


To Be Empty

by without_a_license



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (Hannibal's meat not Will's dogs), (I wouldn't hurt a puppy geez), Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Made-Up Science, Unhappy marriage, Will Graham is a potty mouth, animal cruelty, institutionalized gender inequality, non-consensual drug use implied, pseudo panic attacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 02:20:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 28,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1671128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/without_a_license/pseuds/without_a_license
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal Lecter meets the omega of his dreams...on the arm of an obnoxious alpha. In a universe in which alpha/omega bonds can only be broken by death, how will Dr. Lecter play his cards?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, after months away from the Hannibal fandom, I have returned...with an enormous multi-chapter work that I anticipate will take me the summer to complete. Mostly I just saw Hannibal persuade Will to kill somebody, and I wanted to see it happen again, so I wrote a fic. The title is from the etymology of the word widow. I'm gonna add tags as I go, but I can assure you that there *will* be violence and I will *not* kill Hannibal or Will this time. Everything else is up for grabs. Unbeta'ed, feel free to comment, criticize, etc.
> 
> I've already read a book on passenger pigeons (they're extinct!) and a book on maps of the world this summer, so expect random facts from those two to begin infiltrating the early chapters. Other than that, I'll add notes regarding my omegaverse and my supplementary reading as I go, like I did last time. Unless everyone agrees that this is bad, in which case I guess I'll just respond to individual comments?
> 
> In this chapter, the only worldbuilding moment is Hannibal and Will's "handshake." It is appropriate for alphas to shake each other's hands, and then they should indicate their omega if they will allow a greeting. Bonded omegas offer their right arms, unbonded omegas offer their left arms, and alphas stroke their inner forearm from elbow to wrist with the back of their two first fingers. Omegas generally kiss each other on the cheeks, betas shake hands with everybody (sometimes not omegas, depends on conservativeness). Old-fashioned alphas sometimes knock foreheads, but the opera is too classy for that. I spent two and a half hours thinking about a two sentence greeting. Onward!

Dr. Lecter hears a loud bray of laughter and winces internally. It happened at least once a year, unfortunately. Some _nouveau riche_ Alpha mutt bought himself tickets to the opera and spent the evening irritating true aficionados with his sound and his scent. Luckily for the Baltimore opera community, these irritants had a propensity for disappearing shortly after their first visit. 

With a tip of his champagne glass and a comment that amuses himself and his conversation partner (for very different reasons), Hannibal excuses himself to shop for his next dinner party. He always prefers to serve opera disturbers to his opera acquaintances. 

Hannibal blends seamlessly into the margins of a group of people near the offending man. The man is not particularly tall, maybe 5'10", more of a beta height, really. Thinning blond hair and oppressively red cheeks draw attention to his tiny, piggy blue eyes. 

Hannibal inhales an unpleasant miasma composed of the signature scents of dozens of cities up and down the eastern half of the United States, combined with rental cars, expensive suits poorly cared for, non-recycled cardboard, and chemicals. A pharmaceutical salesman. That explains the money and the rudeness. But there was something else…FBI? It was very faint…

Sensing a pressure point in which he could turn the conversation to his favorite subject, Dr. Lecter speaks with quiet authority, 

"I often recommend that my patients refrain from following the news. It leads to anxiety for a great many people." 

He turns his torso slightly toward his acquaintance, Mrs. Langborough, and she responds just as he'd hoped she would,

"Oh, I know! I can't _believe_ the things they say on television these days! Have you _heard_ about the latest _Ripper_ murder?" 

The salesman seems slightly off-balance at the entrance of another alpha into the conversation, but he regains his footing quickly. 

"Hey, my omega knows all about that stuff! He consults for the FBI a little. Hey, Will! Get over here!" 

The omega who shuffles over is breathtaking in his beauty, and his presence awakens in Hannibal a great anger. The man has something…indefinable, some pattern caught in his sorrowful eyes and curly hair and his tense, guarded mouth. And the _scent_ of him… 

But the young man is obviously quite poorly kept. He is underfed, slightly grimy, uncomfortable in his clothing, and appears not to have slept for days. He has the painful, desperate-sweaty scent of an omega who had not been gentled in several months, yet he shies away from the touch of his alpha. 

If there is one thing Hannibal Lecter does not tolerate, it is rudeness. But if there is a second thing he does not tolerate, it is an exquisite object poorly presented. Such callousness _could not be allowed._

The unworthy alpha prompts his bonded: "So, what d'you think of that murder? The Ripper must have really hated that guy, huh?" 

The omega makes no attempt to conceal his disgust for his husband or his audience. 

"I doubt the Ripper knew him well. The murder was intended as a message for the FBI. He took what he wanted first, then hollowed out the body and removed the defining features to let us know that, even if we should happen upon him, we will never recognize what we have found. We will only see his… _person suit_." 

On that delicious note, the omega wanders away toward the bar without excusing himself. Hannibal will have to train him out of his rudeness eventually, but that can wait. 

The man's current alpha blinks sheepishly at the group, "Sorry about him, he's kind of… Well, you get what you pay for! I bought him off his Da for two grand and a bottle of whiskey, but as long as he comes to bed when I call, I'm happy!" 

The man laughs uproariously at his miserable excuse for a joke, and the assemblage of betas titters uncomfortably. 

Hannibal tips his head and taps Mrs. Langborough's elbow. 

"Who is that man?" 

She curls her lip in response. 

"Peter Carwin. He doesn't _know_ anyone." 

The _ugh_ goes unspoken. Hannibal purses his lips, before asking, "And his mate? William Carwin?" 

Now she smiles slightly. Annoying though she might be, Yvette Langborough has an excellent eye for the interesting. 

"Just Will, I think. Will Graham. I don't know why he kept his name, or anything about him, really, but he is… Well. I wish I could have him over for tea without asking his husband's permission. I don't want _that_ one thinking we're _friendly_." 

She and Hannibal share a mischievous grin, then Hannibal murmurs, "I think I ought to check on the boy. It appears his mate has, perhaps, forgotten that his date is not at his elbow." 

Yvette pats him fondly. "Go on, then, you're such a mother hen. As for me, I simply _must_ find Helena and ask her about that _appalling_ new charity she's started…" 

* * * * *

Dr. Lecter has long cultivated a persona with which he could be excused his little eccentricities, and he rests heavily on that safety net as he stands far too near Will Graham and inhales his scent far too deeply. 

His heart, long grown complacent, actually skips a beat when he notes the faint tinge of sweet encephalitis lingering around the young man's ears and nose. The puzzle pieces in his mind begin to drop into place, faster and faster, filling their wooden frame with a triumphant clacking. The boy has a hated spouse…a traumatic job…Neglected Omega Syndrome…possible Asperger's…insomnia…and _undiagnosed encephalitis_. If there were ever an omega who needed a psychiatrist more _(if there were ever a patient more susceptible to Dr. Lecter's machinations) _…__

__In lieu of Graham's alpha, Hannibal taps the omega's upper arm with the backs of two fingers. The young man turns from his drink and assesses Dr. Lecter for a long, tantalizing moment, before doing the polite thing and offering his right inner forearm to be stroked._ _

__Hannibal speaks._ _

__"Hello, Mr. Graham. My name is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Forgive me if I am out of place, but I was fascinated by your profile of the Chesapeake Ripper earlier. You see, I am a psychiatrist with rather a pet interest in criminal psychiatry, although I specialized in Post-Traumatic Omega Syndrome. I'd love to speak with you further. I believe our conversations could be both interesting and, perhaps, therapeutic."_ _

__At the mention of psychiatry, Graham's already guarded stance shutters even further, until he is little more than a pair of sharp eyes glaring at the tip of Hannibal's nose from within an origami box made of cheap polyester._ _

__"I don't find you very interesting," he enunciates._ _

__Hannibal knows that his mask is slipping, and his true joy is shining out through his eyes, but luckily, Graham sees only his patrician mouth rising in a gentle smile._ _

__"You will."_ _


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Worldbuilding time! 
> 
> Omegas are generally considered more intelligent than both alphas and betas (as a whole, not individually--Hanni's still smarter than most everyone), particularly at the sort of savant-like "genius work" that tends to awe the world. However, their emotional instability means that they generally require an alpha assistant--or "Guardian"--to manage their lives. Vincent Van Gogh is an example of an omega who rejected all attempts to provide him with a guardian and lived a sad but brilliant life instead. Alphas tend to be politicians, military leaders, doctors, etc., but omegas gain fame as mathematicians, artists, writers, and scientists. (They're often a mite agoraphobic, so home jobs are good.) The public absolutely adores what Will here refers to as Guardian and Genius stories--stories in which a good, brave, loyal alpha supports a beautiful, mad, brilliant omega. And together they change the world! A guardian can occasionally be a platonic alpha relative--a parent, child, or sibling--but is usually a mate. Most omegas are not geniuses, and not every alpha-omega bond follows this trope. Some alphas are smarter than their spouses. Some omegas are stay-at-home parents. But if you were making a biopic, a G&G story would be total Oscar bait.

In a way, Graham's statement was literally true. As long as his partner remains alive, the omega will never be sexually interested in another person. Even if a cunning alpha were to attempt to drug or rape him, his body will remain closed and dry unless exposed to the pheromones emitted by his mate. 

For most alphas, this little biological roadblock is enough to stop them from courting married omegas. For Lecter, however, it is practically the only thing that makes the game worth playing. If Graham needs to be widowed before he can be physically seduced, there was nothing for it but to psychologically seduce him into widowing himself. 

* * * * *

Will arrives at the murder scene shaky, starving, and already half-soaked through with sweat, despite having showered before he left the house. He ignores Jack's posturing, pushes rudely past the ostensibly busy mob of people that always surrounds death, and collapses to his knees in front of the corpse of Margaret Mary Bickman. 

He closes his eyes to allow the pendulum to clear the last vestiges of his nightmares from his mind.

_the rasp of metal cutting through air…one…two…three…_

Will opens his eyes.

"I enter the house in the early evening. My objective is not shameful, so I do not need to wait for night. My victim does not know me, but I feel that I know her. I have examined her life and found it worth extinguishing. There is no malice. I stop her from screaming with my hand around her throat, then render her unconscious with two forceful blows to the head. I undress her quickly and begin to carve my spell. This is only practice; she is scrap paper. For my true work, I will use a young, vital body. By the time I reach her navel, I have made too many mistakes to continue. I slash through my previous work: one, two--marking this as Not Right. I exit the house quickly, leaving nothing behind but my ruined rough draft." 

* * * * *

Before he opens his eyes again, he feels Crawford's Alpha orders penetrating his solitude. 

"Tell me what you _saw_ , Will." 

He tries to get his bearings, realizes that he's straightening his glasses with his hands still covered in blue crime scene gloves.

"Get it together, Will! Is he going to _kill again._ " 

If only the bastard would give him a second between questions, maybe…maybe… Will licks his lips, tries to shape his dry mouth into recognizable words. Jack slams a heavy hand onto his shoulder and control slips out of his grasp. 

"Walk me through it, Will. What is this guy's thought process? You're the best, this is why you're here. Just _tell me_ what you _saw._ " 

Will's arm flies up, slapping Jack's hands away from him, guarding his own face.

"I'm fucking trying! If you would just _leave me alone_ for _one fucking second_ and stop asking _stupid questions!_ " 

He clatters down the back steps of the tiny house and pushes out into breathable air. Vaguely, he hears Zeller mutter something that sounds like, "Pissy omega bitch." 

Will smells Crawford approaching and starts a steady litany of _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry._ He's only an omega, god, he shouldn't, he shouldn't, he shouldn't have yelled. The alpha will get him for his insolence, he knows, he knows, he knows. No one is coming, no one will come for him. He curls up into a ball and prays for mercy, shaking and sobbing and gradually growing more worried about the possibility of a bug crawling up his nose and burrowing into his brain. 

He can hear alpha voices talking over his head; he raises the pitch of his apologies slightly to be sure they understand that he is not a threat, never intended, intending, to be a threat, no. 

Someone, some alpha, begins to pull him out of his hysteria. _Hysteria, yeah right. It's not his womb causing his craziness, it's the goddamn dead fucking body inside the house and the murderer inside his head._ Even in the throes of Acute Submission, Will always maintains a sliver of internal personality that mocks him sarcastically throughout. It's one of the things he hates about himself.

Strong hands set him on his knees, push him to sit on his heels, wipe his eyes. A blindfold is fitted over his now dry eyes, and the alpha begins to clean the rest of his face. Will hopes that he knows about the brain-eating bugs. He opens his mouth to explain, but only manages blubbery babbling. The hands fit something else into his mouth, soft silk like the blindfold, and Will closes his lips gratefully around the gag. So nice not to have to see, or talk. So nice to have someone understand. 

He feels alpha hands uncurling his fingers and massaging lightly at the pressure points in his wrists. Not Peter, then. _It would never have been Peter._ Still, if his mate ever did decide to start showing up at crime scenes to soothe Will, he would use the pressure points under his ears or at the base of his skull. 

Not-Peter is speaking in a soft, sonorous voice, and Will rises up from the depths of his panic, but refuses to allow himself to slip back down into the warm quiet place where the voice wants to take him. There is work to do, he's not going to fall over backward and beg for a belly rub at a _crime scene._

Shakily, he pulls back his hands and reaches up to untie the knotted silk around his head. 

"Will…" Jack speaks warningly.

"It is alright," returns Not-Peter. "It is his choice now. If he is ready for conversation, we will talk." 

Will opens his eyes and scrubs the back of his shirt sleeve over his mouth. He feels as though he has just broken a fever after several days of delirium. 

* * * * *

His eyes focus in on one of the pretentious bastards from the opera house. _Dr. Lecter._ He's wearing an expensive suit in an intricate beige plaid, and his tie is plum-and-teal paisley. He looks like a jackass. Will rises carefully to his feet, pushing himself up with his knuckles on the ground and ignoring Lecter's offered hand. 

Clearing his throat, Jack grips Hannibal overly-hard by the shoulder and taps their foreheads together. He's never been one to tolerate additional alphas. The only reason he works with Katz is because she's so mellow she's practically a beta. 

Hannibal Lecter neither reacts to strength of Jack's grip nor inclines his head more than a centimeter. Jack gestures to Will with a flourish; he had intended this meeting to go quite differently, and he is returning to form now. Will Graham and Dr. Lecter _will_ be pleased to make each other's acquaintance, or Jack will _make them._

"Will, this is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He's a private psychiatrist, but he was actually Alana Bloom's mentor before she started teaching. In fact, Dr. Bloom suggested his name to me when I inquired about psychiatrists who specialize in omegas working in unusual fields, and it seems he arrived not a moment too soon." 

"We've met," Will replies shortly, knocking his glasses down to obstruct eye contact and thrusting his right arm toward Lecter. 

Lecter steps closer and bends slightly to look into Will's eyes. His left hand massages lightly at Will's bicep while his right hand strokes down his forearm. It's intimate, obscenely so, and Will jumps back just as Lecter releases him. He wasn't quick enough to avoid those eyes, though. A bloody color that refuses to coalesce in Will's mind as either black or brown or red. Hannibal Lecter looked at him with a concentrated focus, like…like a director watching the first scene of his play. Planning changes to make at intermission, or perhaps, from backstage, while the action continues. 

Hannibal continues gazing at Will as he speaks to Jack, "I made the acquaintance of Mr. Graham and his mate just two weeks ago, at the opera. I was under the impression that his name was Carwin; and so I did not realize that he was the same man Alana had spoken of." 

Jack claps his hands and continues in his faux-civilized voice, trying hard for casual.

"Great! So, Will, I've been getting a lot of heat lately for having an unstable omega on my team, and--"

"I'm not unstable! I'm bonded," Will snaps immediately, moving further from Hannibal and crossing his arms. 

Jack crosses his arms in return and looms. Will suspects he might be standing on tip-toe to achieve the effect.

"We both know that's not that same thing, not for you. Now, unless you want me to get your alpha involved in this--"

Will's arm slices sharply through the air before he tucks it back in, hissing, "Don't! You _know_ , Jack: my alpha has nothing to do with this. This isn't some Genius and Guardian romance novel." 

Jack bristles and puffs his chest out further, "Your alpha has a legal duty to ensure your well-being and to keep you stable enough to function. I get that he's not fulfilling that, and the Bureau is willing to pay for outside psychiatric assistance in this case. Dr. Lecter is the best. Alana Bloom trusts him. Take this for the gift it is, or you're going to find yourself out of a job." 

Jack gives Will another firm pat on the shoulder _(Always has to put Will in his place, always has to remind himself that he's the alpha.)_ before striding away to shout at some more people. 

* * * * *

Lecter smiles at Will, revealing predatory canines.

"It appears we will be having our little talks after all. I hope that I can make them interesting for you." 

Will continues to scowl as Lecter hands him a business card and presses the damp silk fabric from earlier into Will's palms--a pocket square and a handkerchief, he realizes. 

Will clears his throat and coughs roughly. 

"I've been in therapy before, Doctor. I haven't found it helpful. I don't like people trying to get into my head, and when they do--" he chuckles darkly, "--they tend not to like what they find." 

Dr. Lecter lifts Will's left hand and begins palpating his pressure points again--the radial, the ulnar, the deeper pollical and the distal metacarpals. Will feels as though he is detaching from the inside walls of his skin and floating freely within his body.

"If nothing else, I am certified to provide palliative emotional care to married omegas whose own alphas are unable to do so for one reason or another--be it illness, travel, or even death. We can begin working together on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at seven p.m. I will waive my 24-hour cancellation policy because your schedule is unpredictable, but I ask that you at least attempt to contact me before your appointment time if you will not make it." 

Dr. Lecter places Will's hand carefully into the pocket of Will's jacket and smiles gently at him, as though he is an abused child. If only Will weren't feeling so floaty, he'd muster up some bitterness at being pitied. 

"I expect to see you tomorrow promptly at seven. Should you have need of me before then, my cell phone number is on the card." 

* * * * *

As he drives home after spending the afternoon at the lab, Will chews meditatively at the pocket square and rubs the rest of the silk against his face. Part of him wants to toss them to the dogs, now that he's got his pride back, but the corner of his mind that's always been a little darker and cleverer than the rest tucks them into his pocket instead. You never know when you might need someone to see you carrying the gnawed-on handkerchief of a man who is not your mate as though it is a security blanket. Will Graham has a feeling that his life is about to get more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, programming note: Like Margot, I am having extensive surgery on my lady organs. Unlike Margot, my surgery is necessary and not due to my psychopath brother. I'm gonna go in to the hospital on the 28th and be there for five days, probably not writing, but I'll write a lot before then and after then. You're all perfect and I love you.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much to explain, so little space!
> 
> Genders! Beta ladies, omega ladies, and omega dudes can get pregnant. Betas are bad at it and can only have one, maaaaaybe two kids in their life. Omegas are awesome at it and can have a kid a year from like 16 to 42. That's a lotta kids. Beta dudes, alpha ladies, and alpha dudes can impregnate people. Beta dudes are bad at it 'cause their dicks are little and they have a low sperm count. Alpha ladies have a super-special lady penis that is prehensile and internally stored and deposits an egg into their partner. Chromosomes work because handwave. I am not going to write alpha lady porn, but it is a little bit like tentacle porn, and I think I stole this from someone in the Sherlock fandom, but it was like 2 years ago and I lost the fic. To produce an alpha or omega, you have to have at least one a/o parent. Alpha parents are called Mother or Father, other parents are called more casual names like Mama, Daddy, Pop. 
> 
> That is already a lot. Tune in next time for bride prices, heats, pharmaceuticals, and more!
> 
> Side note: They totally make weighted blankets. I do not own one because I don't have $150. I have tried the dumbbell trick and it is effective, if not as effective as finding a guy who will lay on you in exchange for make-outs. *shrug*

Will's phone alarm wakes him up from a nightmare about the Ripper and his heart races as he struggles to place himself. He's on his pile of towels on the floor; he must have been thrashing around during the night. When his nightmares wake up his bedmate, Peter pushes him off the bed and Will sleeps with the dogs.

He's completely soaked in sweat and--he shifts uncomfortably--not sweat. Lately it's been happening more and more--he wakes up from Ripper dreams wet and hard. As a bonded omega, the only things that can get him aroused are his mate--and dreams in which he commits brutal serial murders. He suppresses that knowledge as best he can. 

The dogs are all waiting patiently--Maggie, Winston, and Cooper. Most people would consider Peter's rule limiting Will to no more than three stray dogs to be completely reasonable, but Will thinks it is one of the cruelest things Peter's ever done to him. 

Peter himself is wandering around the bedroom stark naked, eating toast and dropping various objects into his open suitcase. He glances at Will.

"Oh good, you're up. I'm leaving for Atlanta this morning, but we have time for sex. Get on the bed." 

Will stands up and stretches extravagantly.

"Yeah, okay. Lemme feed the dogs and take them out first." 

Peter closes and zips his suitcase, adding his laptop and charger to the outside compartment.

"My flight leaves in 90 minutes, Will. You wanna get fucked, or you wanna feed the dogs?" 

Will is already down the hall when he calls back, "I wanna feed the dogs, then get fucked. You have time, asshole." 

He hears Peter slam a drawer and holler, "You better be wet, at least!" In a lower voice he adds, "They're dogs, not children, Will. They can damn well wait." 

Just for that, Will takes his time measuring out everyone's food and wiping down the floor around their bowls with a wet paper towel before opening the back door. Sex is one of the few things he and Peter do well, but that doesn't mean they're nice about it. 

Will strips off as he walks through their ranch into the back bedroom. Peter's already on the bed, still naked and checking his phone. 

"Finally. I've got 82 minutes before I need to be _on_ the plane, and it's a 25 minute drive." 

Will snorts at him and climbs up, dropping to all fours and rolling out his neck. Peter moves behind him.

"Oh, you are wet. Geez, you're dripping. Dreaming of me, babe?" 

Will rolls back into the first thrust and lets out a long, low moan as his mate fills him completely, fitting him perfectly. Will mated so young, he never had time to get really into masturbation, and therefore he relies on Peter as the sole supplier of orgasms. He's tried by himself, of course, but the angle kills his wrist and he hates the feel of plastic or metal. Unless he's in heat, he can't even get a finger into himself without Peter standing by. But it's not like he ever has to go more than a couple of weeks without sex, so he doesn't really mind. 

"No way," he answers dryly. "Dreaming of my hot new psychiatrist. He's a real alpha's alpha, tall and broad. I'm so into it." 

Peter growls deep in his chest and launches forward, pinning Will with his teeth and fucking him harder and faster. He hates being reminded of his height during sex. He lifts one arm to starts pulling at Will's nipples, alternating right and left and trying to pinch hard enough to make Will gasp. 

"You're a real asshole, you know?" Peter grunts. "Why the fuck did I marry you?" 

Will goes down on one forearm and whimpers slightly as he gets a hand around his vestigial cock. 

"I was on sale--unh! And--" he pauses, panting, "you were horny." 

Peter continues to fuck him hard enough to preclude speech, and Will comes minutes later, a thin clear fluid wetting his fist. Peter grips his hips hard and fucks viciously for about 30 seconds, then comes as well. Peter lets himself drop to the side, mindlessly squeezing at his small knot while he catches his breath. A heat knot would have locked them together for up to two hours, but a non-heat knot is little more than a particularly sensitive base. 

Will rolls over and wriggles out of the wet spot, which pushes him snug into Peter's side. He tucks his face into his mate's armpit and enjoys the rare opportunity to bask in the pheromones.

"When are you coming back?" he asks, lipping lightly at the delicate hair and skin he finds.

"I dunno," Pete answers softly. "Next Wednesday? Thursday? Why, you need something?" He throws his other arm over and strokes lightly at Will's ribs. It is the first non-sexual touch Will has received from his mate in over two months.

"Nah," Will whispers. "I just like to let the dogs know so they can be sure to pee on your stuff and eat your shoes." 

Peter shoves him back, sitting up. "Go take a shower, asshole. You made me late." 

Will does as he's told, shampooing his hair and scouring the salt and slick off of himself with a washcloth. He wonders what Dr. Lecter would think of his sex life, then he wonders at his own wonderment. Objectively, he is fairly certain that Dr. Lecter is considered an appealing alpha, but personally, he is unable to feel more than a vague itch to compare his mate with his psychiatrist in every aspect. Still, the itch has that special glowing quality in his thoughts that suggests it could easily become an obsession. 

* * * * *

Several hours later, Will's phone buzzes during his lecture. He checks it after class and sees two missed texts from Peter.

_missd flite have 2 w8 h8 u_

_babby cryn u o me 10 bjs_

He texts back, _Patience is a virtue._ , then turns off vibrate and heads down to the lab.

* * * * *

Hannibal Lecter's office is an extension of his body: unparalleled in its over-the-top pretentiousness, and far more opulent than is practical. Will finds it difficult to relax in Lecter's space; the multiple levels and furniture arrangements make him feel as though someone else could be hiding there, listening to his psychoses. 

Dr. Lecter's tie picks up the accent color in his upholstery. Will groans internally and prepares himself for a heavy dose of Freud. At exactly 7 o'clock, Lecter speaks.

"Good evening, Will. For now, we will begin our sessions with 30 minutes of talk therapy, and then move to the soothing techniques we spoke of earlier. Is there anything you'd like us to discuss today?"

Will smirks slightly, extending the fingers of both hands over the scrollwork on his chair and leaning back, spreading his legs. It is a position designed to make alphas uncomfortable, and he knows exactly what he's doing. After a full 60 seconds of silence--he counts the clock ticking--Lecter frowns paternally. 

"Will, if you do not wish to speak, you may say so rather than keeping silent. Your own discomfort is no excuse for resorting to incivility. Now. Tell me about your parents." 

Will swallows audibly. 

"My parents? You're getting awfully creative, Doctor. Alana Bloom would be _scandalized._ " 

Before Will has time to adjust his posture, the doctor leans forward, his eyes suddenly iron-black and razor-sharp. 

"I have warned you of rudeness once before, Will Graham. I will not warn you a third time." 

Will crosses one arm over his chest and looks at his knees. Sarcasm is his own constructed defense, but submitting to a predator is pure biology. He speaks.

"My mother was an omega in a shit-hole town in Louisiana. Her Father was an abusive alpha, and her Daddy was a beaten-up, broken-down little man with no fight left. They had a ton of kids--my da thinks maybe 14 or 15--but she was the first omega to bloom up. 

Ah, she was pretty, I guess, considered a good enough match in a town of 5000, but her Father turned down two or three good offers. He started talking 'bout keeping her around, making her raise her brothers and sisters so's her Daddy could rest. Next time she felt her heat coming on, she grabbed ahold of a migrating beta and sold her own self for a ticket outta town. 

That was my dad, obviously. He got lucky twice, they say, 'cause he knocked her up first try, and that was me." 

He clears his throat, pushes at his bangs, tries to lick his accent off his teeth. It won't work; he can't talk _about_ his family without talking _like_ his family. Dr. Lecter speaks.

"And when did she abandon you?" 

Will laughs, short and unhappy. 

"Three months. Yeah. Da got her outta town, changed her name, named his boat after her--loved her okay, I guess--but he didn' have a knot. E'ryone knew she wouldn't stay. No love stories 'bout an omega and a beta. Huh. Some lucky alpha got a wife for free, 'cause whoever it was didn't leave nothing behind."

Will looks up to see how his story is being taken and accidentally meets Hannibal's eyes again. He's caught in a moment, sweet brown eyes that seem so sad and wise, and he wonders why he was afraid before. Hannibal blinks and Will falls back.

"It is interesting that you chose the path you did. In studying the biographies of serial killers, one often finds that the creature who bore them was absent or abusive." 

Will uses his hands to push his knees apart again, playing at dominance, but looking down. 

"If you're trying to fit me into one of my own profiles, you're not the first. The ever-abrasive Freddie Lounds has written an--expose--about me, on TattleCrime.com. The story is trending on Twitter." 

Will works his jaw in dark amusement. Dr. Lecter leaves his chair and walks over to Will's, offering a hand to lift him from his seat. He cradles Will's shoulder with his large hand, holding them only inches apart, and Will stares at Hannibal's shirt collar. 

"As long as we are working together, the only source I trust for information about you, is you. I know that you have not killed anyone. But perhaps, accepting the similarities between yourself and those you study would resolve your inner anxieties." 

Will inhales Lecter's scent of incense and something Will associates with clothing stores. The hand on him shifts to a more casual touch as Lecter steps back. 

"Now we will begin our sensory therapy. Many omegas find that pressure or weight atop their bodies soothes them. These omegas generally turn to their alphas to lie on top of them, blanketing them. Have you tried to find an analog for this before?" 

Will nods. His eyes are half-lidded and he sees what he describes.

"Ye-es. Sometimes I tell Peter that I'm going to the basement to work out. I lie on my back on the cool concrete and I take the weights from his dumbbell set. I place one on my chest, one on my hips, and one on my thighs, and I feel--like an anchor is pinning me to the wet sand at the bottom of the river, and water is flowing over me." 

Lecter's voice is husky. "Good, Will. That is very good. I am pleased that you are able to respond to your own desires." 

The praise hits Will like a stone skipping across a stream, and in a moment it drops down to his toes, leaving a column of bubbles swirling behind it. His throat feels hot. Lecter leads Will to an antique dentist's chair and helps him to sit, reclining it almost all the way.

"I am going to cover you with a series of progressively weighted blankets. You may let your mind go completely while you are under the blankets. Do not be alarmed if you feel me touch your hands or face lightly; I may test small amounts of tactile or olfactory stimuli for use in future therapies. I'm going to slip a mask over your eyes now. Are you ready?" 

Will nods again. He feels like he might cry. He was worried that the--palliative emotional care--would be awkward or difficult, but this sounds like exactly what he has been craving for the last fifteen years, maybe for his entire life. 

He feels the first blanket pinning him to the chair, and his eyes drop shut beneath their black silk covering. His fingers loosen from the chair, his knees fall lightly to the sides, and his chin drops. Classical music begins to play softly.

* * * * *

After placing the first blanket, Hannibal turns on the stereo, then stands at his desk as he writes up his decoy notes on the session. Ten minutes later, he caps his pen and walks over to place a second blanket over Will. After doing so, he uses the back of his pen to probe lightly at one of Will's ears. The omega whines, winces, shifts, and bats with one hand. He is still too conscious to be played with, but his encephalitis seems to be developing well, judging by his low-grade fever. 

Hannibal returns to his desk and retrieves a key hidden within a larger key. The larger key opens a display cabinet filled with old maps (including an original Cassini). In a corner next to the window above a heating vent, there is a small door painted the color of the wall. It appears to have had some prior use, painted over when the building was restored. The painted wallpaper peels away, and Hannibal uses his hidden key to open a small vault filled with his private objects, including his personal patient notes. He begins his entry on Will in a reversed form of Lithuanian he invented as a young boy. Some of what he does is to protect this identity, and some of it is just for the aesthetic thrill it brings. 

After twenty minutes, he returns to Will's side with a collection of various items to encourage the omega's development. 

As promised, his tray contains an assortment of essential oils, various straps and cuffs, and a set of confining mittens that he's found patients either love or hate. After testing these stimuli and recording the changes in Will's heart rate and breathing pattern, he sets his first tray aside and retrieves another. 

These objects are more unique, things he made or acquired himself. A covered scalpel. A bone and silver knife. A sealed container holding a pair of Peter Carwin's boxer briefs. Several paper packets filled with powders. A pair of tweezers. Three different colognes from Hannibal's personal collection--he matches his scent to the setting and to his companion. 

The last object is his favorite, a new addition to his toy box. It is a small digital recording device loaded with a sample of Peter Carwin's voice. It has been chopped and mixed so that no message is conveyed, only the timbre and cadence of Carwin's speech. He has similar samples of himself, Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom, and a particularly obnoxious psychiatrist by the name of Chilton. He plans to obtain further recordings of a variety of messages, from Will himself and from the others. 

As for today, not every voice is heard. Not every powder is sniffed. Not every tool is held. But some are, and as they are, Dr. Lecter records his results in cryptic Lithuanian, in a notebook he tucks into the wall. 

* * * * *

Two and a half hours later, Will Graham is awakened and sent home, feeling well-rested and melancholy. That night he feeds his dogs and goes to bed alone.


	4. Chapter 4

Will sleeps early and hard, but the depth of his sleep only serves to press his nightmares deeper under his skin. He is certain there had been something about Peter…Will had definitely flayed at least one limb of a girl (and enjoyed it)…he thinks he might've been fucked by a feathered stag…or maybe the other way around. Dismissing these, he chases the shadow of one bit of dream: a black man (not brown or African-American, but black all through) with antlers on his head, and…Will kissed him, and bit his lip, and peeled away his skin to reveal…something. 

His phone buzzes. It's Jack. He answers. 

"Dead body?" 

"Yeah, it's the one you've been working with. The hieroglyph lady." 

"Another old woman?"

Jack rustles papers. "Yep. 91-year-old Cora B. Mathers. Lives alone, found carved up in her kitchen, estimated time of death 7 p.m."

Will sighs. "Text me the address." 

* * * * *

_The pendulum swings back and forth across Will's mindscape. One…two…three…_

"I enter the little house through the unlocked back door and find my victim in the kitchen, as planned. I remind myself that it is okay to kill her. This one does know me, just barely. She is trying to place my face when I cut off her airway and punch her head. One blow, then a second…I pause, but she is not out yet. I hit her again, and then twice more to be certain. I am afraid that she will wake up and catch me at my work. Slicing through her cotton dress, I lay her out on the floor and begin my carving. Her blood is sluggish and thin. I am not pleased with its consistency. My strokes are improving, as is my memory for the runes, but my victim quality is not. Her thin skin tears and wrinkles and _ruins_ my design. I stab her in the stomach in frustration, and the foul smell of her broken bowels surprises me. I jump and run, leaving a footprint in my haste. I am running out of time." 

Will strips off his gloves and walks out to Jack. Only one session with Dr. Lecter and he already feels more capable of leaving the killer behind. It helps that this particular killer is less than tenacious. 

Jack raises his eyebrows. "Got anything new?" 

Will nods, only a little shaky. "Yeah. Definitely a woman, late twenties, beta. No partner, history of mental illness, interest in the occult. College degree, but I don't think she uses it. I think she might be a caregiver of some sort, but a menial one. She has to pick her victims somehow, and this one recognized her. Look at home healthcare, lab assistants, maybe even a church volunteer…she won't draw much attention to herself, but I bet she's online." 

Jack sighs. "That's not much, Will, but we'll start looking for connections between the vics. Church, grocery store, hospital, whatever we can find. Anything else? What's her next move?" 

Will's eyes droop slightly as he slides in and out of the killer he's just visited. 

"You know she's leading up to something. She's running out of time, and she needs fresher bodies. The old woman was too frail, and her skin and blood ruined the markings. Expect her next vic to be a peer, but not the golden ticket. She needs at least one more practice before she gets to the real thing. I'm not sure…check the star charts and the pagan calendars and the moon cycle. Maybe we can find her D-day." 

Jack wraps a paternal arm around Will and leads him away from a group of crime scene photographers. 

"We've been studying the runes from the first body…they're not _real._ " 

Will raises his eyebrows. "Yes, Jack, I am aware that magic is not real." 

Jack squeezes his arm and glares briefly. "No, I mean she's not using any kind of standard magic system. There's Egyptian hieroglyphs, Norse runes, Japanese characters, Western astrology…most of it is drawn wrong, and what we can identify makes no sense."

Will wipes his nose and takes two aspirin. "So she's schizophrenic. That would explain the compulsion and illegibility. She's working off a script the rest of us will never see." 

Jack guides Will back to his car and opens his door for him. 

"Maybe so. I just hope we find her before she gets another one." 

* * * * *

When he arrives home, Will finds that he can't stand to be in his own house. With an odd sense of urgency, he gathers up all the bedding and clothing he can find and starts doing laundry. Then he showers and begins dusting. He wipes the kitchen down with bleach. He at least resists the urge to vacuum, because it would frighten the dogs. 

When he finally looks around at the freakishly clean house, he wonders if this is a new symptom of his own psychosis. Sympathetic OCD? But with whom? Or maybe he's finally nesting. He's never felt particularly eager to have children, but his biological clock _is_ ticking. 

Changing his clothes, which are sweaty again, Will resolves to take the dogs out to play and forget about his weird cleaning spree. Maybe he can use it as leverage against Peter to wriggle out of a social obligation. 

* * * * *

At 4 p.m., Jack calls. 

"We got her. The vics used the same pharmacy. We asked the manager about any odd employees, she immediately pointed to a beta clerk who had been missing shifts and muttering to herself. Family history of schizophrenia. She confessed almost immediately." 

Will runs his hand through his hair and tries to figure out how he ended up in his backyard, covered in dirt. His memory blanks out after lunch. 

"You should be happy, Will. She was going to kill at least twice more. We got her because of your profile. You saved those people's lives." 

Will pinches his nose, then realizes he's smearing dirt all over his face. 

"Um, yeah, yeah. I am happy. Really. But I feel like you're waiting to ask me something." 

"You heard about that case up in Minnesota?"

Jack sounds warm, pleased. He loves solving cases, and he's looking forward to catching another one. 

"Bunch of just-bloomed omega girls gone missing? Yeah, I heard." 

Jack grunts approvingly. 

"We're taking the case. I've e-mailed you all the files. He's speeding up, less time between the kills, so let your alpha know that you could be called to Minnesota at any time. If there's another one…" 

Will looks around his yard. It appears that he led the dogs in a competition to see who could dig the biggest hole. Will won. He thinks Winston probably helped him. He watches his pack: hyper Cooper, still digging furiously; fat old Maggie, flopped on her belly in the sun; and Winston, sitting loyally by Will's side. Will is the alpha of this pack. The poor dogs. 

"I get it, Jack. My husband doesn't give a shit where I go or what I do, so I hope it won't be a problem if I fail to bring my _permission slip._ " 

He can picture Jack's "I-don't-have-time-for-this" face. 

"What happens in your marriage is none of my business, Will. I just don't want to be responsible for taking another man's omega across state lines against his wishes. That's kidnapping. Speaking of, how's the new therapist working out?" 

Will huffs out a short, harsh laugh. 

"I'm going to call him right now, actually. Goodbye, Jack." 

* * * * *

Will spends several minutes crouched in his muddy hole, poking at his phone and talking to operators until the exchange finally takes him to Dr. Lecter's cell phone. 

"Hello, Will." 

The vowels in Dr. Lecter's accent appear to Will like soft bits of pastel cotton, and he smiles despite the situation. 

"Dr. Lecter. I need your help."

Hannibal murmurs encouragingly.

Will gestures expansively as he speaks, although he knows that Hannibal can't see him. 

"I saw a crime scene this morning. Then I came home and cleaned my whole house. I don't know why. Then I lost time, and I woke up in my backyard, where my dogs and I seem to have dug up the whole fucking thing. Jack called me to tell me that I caught the killer--a mentally ill woman, hooray!--and he wants me to start on _another_ case right away, a guy who kills teenage omega girls." 

"I see. It sounds as though you are under a great deal of stress--even a solved case can be stressful for you, with the way in which you profile. And your mate is unavailable to comfort you, correct?"

Will tries to laugh, but it comes out like a sob. He rubs his face again--more dirt. 

"Sometimes I think there's something wrong with him. Alphas are supposed to need omegas, too, aren't they? But he's never initiated…comfort. He was always so surprised when I used to ask him to touch me. Like he didn't know that humans needed touch beyond sex." 

Hannibal contemplates this briefly before coming to a decision and packing his things. 

"Will, you have mentioned to me that your husband is out of town, and that he rarely shows any signs of typical alpha jealousy with regards to the scents of others upon his mate. I am finished with my work for the day, and I am coming to your home." 

Will draws on his own reserves of strength to ignore the feathery black stag in his peripheral vision.

"Dr. Lecter, no, you can't. I'll be fine if I--"

"Will. I am coming to your home because you are my patient and you are in distress. I want to do this, and so I will. I suggest that you practice doing things that you want to do, without apology or argument. I find it gives a sense of personal power. Would you like me to stay on the phone with you while I drive?" 

"No…" Will mumbles dreamily. He seems to be slipping away again. "I'm gonna wash the dogs and me and the stag. You can let yourself in." 

Hannibal is delighted. He may arrive to find Will in another state of lost time. 

"You should not leave the doors unlocked when you are home alone, Will--"

A clatter, then nothing. Will has dropped his phone. Hannibal drives faster. 

* * * * *

Rather than walking through Will's home, Dr. Lecter unlatches the fence and walks around the house into the backyard. He finds Will resting on his haunches, looking up at something with wary disgruntlement. The omega and his three hounds are all soaking wet and covered in mud, and the leaky garden hose is still steadily dribbling water into one of the odd graves that Will seems to have dug. The dogs notice him and begin to bark, growling and moving to guard their master. Will silences them with a sharp command, but continues gazing upward. 

"Hello, Will." 

The man who glances back at him is not yet in this world. 

"Hey, Dr. Lecter. Look at this thing," he gestures to the humid, buggy air he'd been glaring at. "What d'you reckon? Some kinda mutation? And why the hell would it jump the fence…"

Hannibal begins to approach Will slowly, giving him time to see the pitying concern the doctor has slipped over his own face. "Will, please tell me what you see." 

Will huffs and blinks, then inhales deeply and repeatedly. _Trying to catch its scent,_ Hannibal realizes. 

"Ah, ah, never mind. Saw an odd bird…like a jay, but with, uh, purplish feathers. Um, it's…gone now. Dogs scared it away, I think." 

Will stands, rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck.

"I'm sorry you had to come all this way, but I'm fine now. Just tired. I'll make you some coffee for your drive back, then take a shower. Um, I might not see you for a while; I'm going to Minnesota. Sorry." 

Hannibal's heart rate speeds up. So few things have the power to excite him, but at moments like this, it seems he has the devil in his corner. The pieces continue to fall into place…

"Nonsense, Will. You have already confessed to having a difficult afternoon, and I have already made plans to care for you tonight. As you are going away, this session is even more vital." 

Will works his jaw briefly, accentuating his slight underbite, then nods.

"Ah…I'm not sure where to start." 

* * * * *

Hannibal keeps watch over Will as he makes omelets from the poor offerings he finds in the refrigerator. He'll be sure to bring his own ingredients next time. 

The omega seems, if not content, at least calm as he works at the task Hannibal set him. He rinses off the dogs bare-chested, sending each one inside as it is washed and dried. Then he turns and fills in the dogs' holes with a shovel he retrieves from the shed. As he moves to fill in his own hole, the one large enough to hold the body of a medium-sized man (though not deep enough--not yet), Hannibal calls out to him through the kitchen window. 

"Leave that one alone." 

Will gazes up at him, his blue eyes clear and neutral. Untroubled. 

"We will fill it together when you have progressed further into your therapy. For now, come inside and bathe yourself." 

Will nods and obeys without a word, but his steady eyes stay on Hannibal. Hannibal wonders what he sees. 

* * * * * 

After Will has showered and they have both eaten, Will hesitates awkwardly but does not attempt to dismiss Hannibal again. He is learning. Hannibal smiles and takes Will gently by the elbow. 

"Have you ever heard of the practice of an alpha guiding an omega around a house or room, naming its objects and therefore imbuing the location with a sense of safety?" 

Will nods, jerkily. 

"Yes. Yeah. I remember when we moved here. The real estate agent thought Peter would want to do that for me. She tried to show him the house first, while I waited in the front room. And she had a map of the neighborhood, so that he could learn it and then teach me."

Hannibal caresses up Will's arm in short strokes until he is running large, light circles across the omega's trembling back. 

"But your alpha did not perform his duties." 

Will begins to shrug, then stops himself, unwilling to make a movement that might cause Dr. Lecter to stop rubbing his back. 

"It wasn't necessary. I'm perfectly capable of figuring out where the bathrooms and the electrical outlets are by myself." 

Lecter hums softly. 

"You have lived in this house for a number of years. Do you ever feel as though it is changing on you? Windows out of their places, corners where you thought the hall continued…" 

Will swallows and curls himself further into Hannibal's open embrace.

"Sometimes I dream about this house. In the dream, every part of it is different, but I know it's here. There is an elevator, and I always forget where it will take me until I arrive and realize that the place I'm in is worse than where I was, and I can't go back. Eventually I wake up. Over the next few days, I find that the real house and the dream house overlap in my mind, so that I can never predict where I am. It's like trying to walk on a sidewalk where snow has been beaten into thick ice by thousands of boots. No matter where you step, you always slip." 

Hannibal begins to slowly lead Will around the kitchen, opening cabinets and placing Will's hands on objects without actually naming them.

"The first act of man in the Garden of Eden was to name the creatures he found. In doing so, Adam becomes the master of the animals, subordinate only to God himself. The practice of naming is the first stage of apotheosis, man becoming God. Tonight it will be the first stage in your own becoming. Name the things we touch." 

Will begins in a whisper, Hannibal still directing both his steps and his hands. 

"Stove. Coffee maker. This is the cabinet where we keep coffee mugs." 

Hannibal curls Will's hands into fists--he has gotten it wrong. "For the length of this exercise, please refer only to yourself, in the singular. This is where _you_ keep coffee mugs." 

Will swallows, nods, and tries again. 

"This--this drawer has take-out menus. This one has measuring cups and things like that. This one has dish towels." 

Hannibal draws Will's hands back again. "Now you are avoiding the question. You must own your own home--these drawers did not fill themselves." 

Will lets out a long, shuddering breath, and swings one hand out of Hannibal's grip. He speaks louder.

"This is my pantry. I keep the dog food on the floor and the canned food on the lowest shelf. Here is where I put the spices, and here is where I put the medicine. This is my kitchen table, and these are my chairs. I sit in this one, usually. That's the--that's my microwave." 

He glances back at Dr. Lecter. The man's eyes are shining with an unholy gleam, one side of his lip curling upward to reveal a wet canine. Will may be his Adam, but Hannibal Lecter is no benevolent Father. 

In the time it takes for Will to adjust his glasses and refocus his eyes, Dr. Lecter regains the appearance of a gently pleased psychiatrist.

"Very good, Will. Let's move on to your bedroom."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait. I've had half of this written for like a month, so I think I just need to publish it and move on. My surgery went well, although post-surgical depression is a thing I was not warned about.
> 
> The theory about naming things is something I've thought about for years and developed mostly on my own, but I think the original seed of the idea came from the movie Bee Season. I watched it like eight years ago, but I remember it being pretty good.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short one, but I said what I needed to say. I guess I should add a little world-building, since I know it already and y'all don't. Omegas heat about once every 3 months, heat suppressants aren't used much because they can only postpone heats by a couple of weeks. Mostly you use them if your heat falls on your sister's wedding day or your exam week or something. They're easy to get ahold of, though. Birth control you need an alpha for, but Will's been on it since he got married. Heats take like 3-5 days, tops. Standard heat tropes apply. Ah, omegas usually have their first heat between ages 15-17. The first one isn't a breeding heat; it's like that weird period you get before you get your real period, or was that just me? Anyway, Will was 17 when he got married, and he'd had his pseudo-heat and one real heat. Peter found him on the cusp of his third. 
> 
> Alphas are supposed to pay a dowry fee to the parents/guardians of their omega. It's nominally supposed to cover the costs of raising the omega, although it doesn't really, but it varies by socioeconomic class. A super-rich omega who'd been to finishing school and spoke eight languages and played the violin could easily cost $200-500,000. A normal middle class amount would probably be about a year's salary, so like 45 grand. Even in poor areas, selling an omega for under 10k is just Not Done. The implication of Will's low bride price (and Peter's insistence on mentioning it in public) is that there's something Wrong with him. It's also just super rude. Shockingly rude. I'm secondhand embarrassed for Will right now. 
> 
> Anyway, onward and upward.

The two weeks following Will's lawn excavation are surprisingly quiet, though not exactly pleasant. 

The region's plethora of serial killers politely confine themselves to Will's powerpoint slides, but he still finds his dreams becoming more violent and bleeding further into everyday life. The night after Peter returns home, he tells Will to go sleep in the spare bedroom. Even from the floor, his thrashing and sweating are too much. After that, Will stays in the spare of his own accord. He finds himself less desperate for his mate's touch than he once was, now that he knows he can count on being gentled by a competent alpha at least twice a week. As a passive aggressive punishment toward his mate, Will goes around the house and quietly disinfects surfaces that Peter has scent-marked. Peter does not appear to notice this, nor does he comment on Dr. Lecter's scent lingering in the kitchen and bedroom. 

Will knows that there is something wrong with him. He wakes up to find himself standing in his yard-hole three separate times. Once he wakes up two blocks from home, barefoot and exhausted. He finds he cannot get through a lecture without the taste of blood flooding his mouth, and keeps almost catching something out of the corner of his eye, although his mind can't resolve what it is. Something-- Just something. 

It is like a migraine aura. He knows things are getting worse, but as long as he hides it from everyone around him, as long as he resists defining it in his own mind, he can pretend that nothing needs to change. So he sits on the bathroom counter and washes his feet in the sink, and he tells himself that he is just seeing the frame of his glasses, and he swallows compulsively to wash the taste of iron out of his mouth. 

* * * 

One Tuesday evening, Will arrives at Lecter's office to find the door still shut. He spends a few moments looking at all the furniture and artwork in the lobby that he is never early enough to take advantage of before the door swings open. It is Hannibal, ushering out a short, stout, unmated omega. The little man absolutely reeks of simpering desperation.

"Maybe I'll see you at the opera again, Dr. Lecter. We're birds of a feather, you and I. Both opera-lovers, both interested in fine dining…we have so much in common, it's a shame we only get to see each other once a week." 

The omega is hanging on Lecter like a child trying to get her father to swing her up in the air. Will hates his obsequious smile and his leering eyes and his trying-too-hard outfit. Lecter, at least, seems similarly unimpressed.

"I pride myself on a healthy work-life balance, Franklin. I must ask you to leave once more, as my next patient has been kept waiting." 

Will makes sure Franklin sees his unimpressed eye roll before he shuffles through the outer door. 

Will had been having a good day, or at least a not-bad day, but now he feels as though he has a hive of bees buzzing beneath his skin. Hannibal always allows Will to roam the office as he pleases during their talk therapy, so Will takes the opportunity to roll up his sleeves and rub his hands over everything _Franklin_ has touched. Eventually, he finds himself sitting in his usual therapy chair, rubbing his hands roughly, uselessly, over the upholstery. The man must sweat like a pig; his odor is impossible to cover up. 

Dr. Lecter remains silent until Will snaps, "Do you ever air this place out?"

Lecter raises his eyebrows and steeples his fingers.

"On occasion. However, I possess a uniquely powerful sense of smell, and I prefer to leave my scent tracks intact whenever possible. You seem troubled by the traces of my earlier patient. Do you know why?" 

Will vaults out of the chair and takes another circuit through the office while he gathers his thoughts. He pauses standing sideways behind his chair, gripping it with one white-knuckled hand, and delivers his verdict in a harsh whisper. 

"It is like watching a slug try to mount a butterfly. He _disgusts_ me." 

* * * 

Hannibal's last appointment of the evening more than makes up for his penultimate patient. Will felt jealousy over him, although it translated to revulsion in his mind. And now, beautiful Will is reclining deeply in his dentist's chair, under a light form of hypnosis that Hannibal invented himself and has been tweaking ever since. 

Hannibal dips his own long thumb deeply into a jar of honey, covering it all the way to the base of his wrist. He withdraws carefully, catching the weeping strands on a piece of parchment, before setting his hand at Will's waiting mouth.

As Will suckles hungrily, Hannibal slides out his notebook. He is ambidextrous, but he only writes with his left hand when taking notes that must never be associated with the name Hannibal Lecter. Having four sets of handwriting (he maintains two for each hand) has served him well in the past. 

He slides his thumb out of Will's mouth, dangling it over his face to watch him stretch and weave his head like a cat following a treat.

"You said that your nightmares are becoming worse. Who are you dreaming about the most?"

Will doesn't hesitate. 

"The South Dakota Scarecrow. He's one of my favorites." 

Hannibal swallows his own jealousy with some difficulty and shoves his hand back into Will's mouth perhaps harder than necessary. Along with the associated amnesia, this kind of uninhibited honesty is the reason why these conversations must take place under hypnosis.

Hannibal pulls his hand back so Will is licking and biting only at his thumbnail. 

"Tell me about him." 

Will sucks in the pad of his thumb and chatters his teeth lightly around it before pushing it out with his tongue. 

"They call him the scarecrow because he made a bunch of scarecrows, but I prefer his other work. He was a rancher, and he never hunted--he only ever killed prey that trespassed on his land."

Will pauses to get more honey from Hannibal, opening and closing his lips like a little bird. 

"An alligator," Hannibal suggests, using his fingers to scratch lightly at Will's stubble while he feeds.

Will nods and leans into the touch.

"Yes. So once he had them, he'd take his victims out to the wilderness and do it quick--one clean slice of the throat. Then he'd open up the body and leave it for the animals to pick clean--but first, he'd bury the bowels. One lady had a necrotic foot from diabetes, and he buried that, too. He didn't want to leave spoiled meat,. After that, he'd usually scalp them, scavenge a few of the delicate bones from the face and hands, and sometimes take fingernails, if they were any good. He'd have liked yours. He went back for the long bones later." 

Will returns to Hannibal's hand, scraping his teeth under and around the nail bed before moving his head to lick at the trails running down Hannibal's wrist. 

"That was all?" Hannibal whispers. "He just took his trophies and left the rest as an offering?" 

Will shakes his head. 

"He'd make these beautiful structures and place them at intervals along his fencing. Mostly scarecrows, like I said, but there was this mobile of the solar system, with different sized bones for the planets. The hyoid bone was Saturn's rings--it was perfect. And in his house, we found his magnum opus--a marionette made out of human bones that actually worked. Price made it do a little tap dance. Now it's crumbling away in some evidence room forever." 

While Will is speaking, Hannibal takes a dropper and adds something to the spots where honey still lies thick upon his hand. 

"How tragic," Hannibal rumbles. Will wrinkles his nose at the new taste, but soon becomes preoccupied with cleaning Hannibal's hand. 

"So this is what excites you? Art made out of flesh? I would think you'd be more interested in the Chesapeake Ripper, then." 

Dangerous, dangerous. Will looks up at him with pupils so large no blue is visible. 

"No. No. The scarecrow was a man--intelligent, competent, interesting--but just a man like me. I could have been him. If I was a serial killer, I'd want to be him. But the Ripper--" 

Will swallows and impales himself on Hannibal's thumb once more. Hannibal waits, then holds his hand out of reach when no answer seems to be forthcoming.

Will whimpers, and then his face settles into something powerful and omniscient as he gazes directly into Hannibal's eyes. 

"The Ripper is not like me at all. He's a God, not a man." 

With a snarl, Hannibal surges forward into Will's space, bracing himself with a knee on the chair. He digs his left hand hard into Will's scalp and moves the omega's head where he wants it, forcing him to finish cleaning his alpha's hand. From the endorphins rolling off of Will in waves (though sadly free of arousal), Hannibal realizes that he is not the only one who likes it when their conversations turn toward violence.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I could translate my scenes into the gorgeous cinematography of the actual show. There is so much I want to convey that is just images and motifs. We will return to a less trippy narration next chapter, probably. I'm super jealous of those writers who are like, "I already wrote the whole thing and I'm just posting as I edit because I'm perfect and not an amateur!" 
> 
> Cognitive dissonance has long been a research interest of mine, but the paragraph about sour grapes was most recently influenced by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander's _Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking._ Like all of Hofstadter's work, it is fantastic, although his examples tend to swarm up on you like a colony of bees. Someone needs to tell the man that if 3 examples are good, that does not mean 33 examples are better. Clearly that someone was not Emmanuel Sander.

"I don't know what the fuck I'm doing anymore," Will complains as he scrunches himself deeper into Hannibal's armchair. It is Thursday. 

He looks at Lecter, taking in his dark scarlet plaid and gold filigreed tie. He still looks like a pretentious fuckwit, but he's somehow become the only person in Will's life that he ever actually wants to see. 

Will blinks his eyes. Between his glasses, his heavy lids, and his ever-growing dark circles, it's a miracle he sees anything at all. Yet he still manages to see too much. Dr. Lecter, Will has realized, would like to fuck him. 

He wonders what his life would be like if it had been Lecter's car that broke down 15 years ago. Would Will still be a profiler? Or would he be a pretty trophy, dressed in bespoke suits and entertaining dinner gifts with a PhD that he earned but never used? Would he be allowed to have dogs? Would he resent the removal of all of his freedom, if Hannibal were there to bear him down into dreamless sleep every night? 

He picks at his fraying corduroys. Like the fox who labels unreachable grapes too sour to eat, Will can do nothing but think himself lucky not to have married someone so pretentious and perceptive. To do otherwise invites only useless yearning. Dr. Lecter can fuck right off. He clears his throat.

"I'd divorce him if I could. Ten thousand reasons I wish I was a beta, but that might be the biggest one." 

Lecter's eyes sharpen briefly, as they always do before he gives an alpha order. He enjoys ordering Will around, too, although he often holds himself back. Will can see that much. 

"Never wish yourself a beta, Will. To do so is to spurn the brilliant for the mundane." Lecter crosses his legs and leans forward, as though he is about to impart some therapeutic wisdom. 

"Have you considered the alternative route to ending your marriage?" 

Lecter quirks his lip a little and raises his eyebrow like he's the cleverest thing on two legs. 

Will rolls his eyes and tsks. 

"Funny, doctor. They teach you that in med school? Suggesting murder really puts patients at ease." 

Hannibal merely waits. He never gives Will the easy way out, and he never rests until Will has incriminated himself more thoroughly than the good doctor. Everything is Dr. Lecter's idea, and yet, nothing ever is. 

Will grimaces and clasps his knees. "There are only three confirmed incidents of an omega killing their alpha, which you well know, and all of those occurred while the omega was deeply psychotic and unaware of their actions. So unless you wanna drug me up until I think Peter is a bobcat that needs shooting, I have to content myself with praying he gets hit by a bus." 

Hannibal nods sympathetically. 

"Do you often pray, Will?" 

Will is saved from _that_ loaded gun by the ringing of his cellphone. He answers and listens for a moment, then hangs up. 

"'S Jack. Dead girl in Minnesota. He wants me at the airport now, and you too, if you feel like it. He'll pay you a consulting fee and you can leave whenever you want. Apparently I'm too _unstable_ to bring along without a babysitter." 

Hannibal is already gathering his things. 

"Did you mean to say 'missing girl'?"

Will shakes his head. 

"Nope. Dead girl. He tucked her body neatly into bed." 

* * * * *

Will's memories of the next three days are detailed shards that he makes no effort to organize. He remembers Dr. Lecter carefully applying ear plugs and an eye mask to him after they were seated on the plane, and holding him steady with a hand on his thigh throughout the flight. 

He remembers ordering coffee from a barista with obviously blocked sinuses, and being told, "Your alpha already ordered for you, honey." 

He remembers the girl, of course. The girl who liked trains. Spoiled meat: a perfect meal, wasted. The strange feeling that killing her but not using her body gave him--like he was standing on tiptoes, holding his breath, waiting for the last chord to would resolve the melody--but it never came. And no matter how many times he replayed the piece in his head, humming the conclusion to himself, he could never reach satisfaction. 

He remembers the gift--beautiful, arrogant, and exactly what he needed. The copycat's disdain for his victim mirrors both the Shrike's love for his own girls, and the copycat's love for Will. Someone loves him. He tries to think who cares for him enough to create such a thoughtful present, and his mind fills with a harsh buzzing, like a thousand flies rising up within his skull. 

He remembers running up to the house, careening off the outer edge of his foot as he raises his gun. He remembers the girl, _the_ girl, Abigail Hobbs, and her neck and her face and her mother. 

And he remembers pulling the trigger. He remembers Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Will Graham's first victim. And as power rushes upward, fear crashing down upon it in a wave equally as mighty, Hobbs grins and hisses, "See? _See?_ "

And Will does see. He sees a blood-splattered man dying on the floor, because Will made him die. He took something that was, and made it something that was not. 

He sees Lecter trying to save the girl, holding in her arterial blood with his hands. He sees himself and Hannibal as a pair of gods, himself causing a death even as Hannibal halts one. The sudden knowledge rockets through his chest in the painful way that his insights have always come, and he imagines rising to a height in which knowledge no longer has the power to hurt him. 

He sees Abigail Hobbs' round blue eyes and gaping mouth, and she looks at him the way fish look at him the moment before he slits their throats. 

He sees Jack and Katz and Price and Zeller. Others, strangers. They could be dead, if he wished it. He has the power to make people dead. 

He sees Dr. Lecter watching at him, caring for him. Lecter doesn't look at Will as though he is a fragile teacup anymore. Now he looks at Will--as though he is a young hawk that Hannibal is raising by hand to become a hunter. Delicate today, killer tomorrow. He sees. 

He recalls with perfect clarity the moments after the EMTs arrive to care for Abigail Hobbs. Hannibal comes swiftly to stand in front of Will, molding his large hands to Will's ribcage. Jack shoulders his way into their moment, and Hannibal lifts his hands, and Will looks down to see two scarlet hand prints marking his sides. The sight hangs in his field of vision endlessly. It becomes a fixed point in Will's memory, which he can return to at any time without the following minutes and hours cascading in unbidden. Later, he will spend hours counting the breaths contained in that moment, the brief seconds when Hannibal raised his hands and Will saw the prints. 

He has been marked. He has killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs. He has seen.


	7. Chapter 7

Will stands at the window in Hannibal's office. He is clean--clean-shaven, clean hair, clean clothing. He even washed his shoes. If cleanliness is next to godliness, Will expects his divinity to arrive shortly. 

Hannibal comes to stand behind him. Their shadows overlap. 

"I recently read about an interesting psychological experiment," the doctor begins in a neutral tone. "The subjects were asked to recall a time when they behaved badly. Afterward, half the group washed their hands, while the other half did not. All of the subjects--mainly university students--were then asked to tutor an underachieving student. Those who had not washed their hands were exceedingly more likely to agree." 

Will blinks very slowly. As has happened many times since he killed Garrett Jacob Hobbes, he becomes acutely aware of how his breath moves his body, pushing his chest in and out like a ventilator machine. Rather than his lungs serving his mind, his consciousness is only a side effect of his lungs' continual struggle to keep cycling gas. He breaks the steady breathing rhythm on purpose, sniffing and huffing out of sheer pigheadedness. 

"And here I thought you'd be pleased to see me spending more time on hygiene. Are you suggesting I should take up charity work instead?" 

As the sky outside the window grows darker, the features of Hannibal's face slowly rise to the surface of his reflection. Will watches the movements of his lips as he speaks. 

"You have no reason to feel guilty, Will. What you did was just, and also legal." Hannibal gives a half-shrug and a smirk, as though the legality of murder was only a slight bonus to men such as they.

"However, if you find that your soul feels soiled, you might consider offering your aid to someone who needs you. There is a young girl in the Baltimore Omega's Hospital who recently lost her omega parent." 

Will turns away from Hannibal's reflection. For some reason, he finds it easier to avoid the corporeal man's gaze than that of the dark-eyed reflection. He braces himself against the windowsill and leans back. Without looking up, he knows that Hannibal finds the sight of him alluring, but he doesn't care.

"I'm in no position to be anyone's surrogate parent. I never had an omega parent, or an alpha one, for that matter. I never met her mom and I killed her father. I'm pretty sure there's nothing I could do except fuck her up more." 

He purposely doesn't say her name. Everyone knows that the first step toward adoption is naming it. Hannibal takes one step forward and reaches out to lift Will's chin.

"We saved her life, dear Will, and thus forged a bond as powerful as that created by giving birth. We must accept responsibility for her new life. We are her parents now." 

Hannibal opens his arms and clutches Will to his chest, and it is almost everything Will wants. He could do without the corpse of Garrett Jacob Hobbs crouching in Will's armchair and smirking at him over Hannibal's shoulder. And the stupid alpha _still_ doesn't smell right. 

"I fucking hate your cologne," he chokes out, still squeezing Hannibal as tightly as he dares. Hannibal stiffens for a moment, then rubs his hand soothingly up and down Will's back. 

"With everything that has happened lately, it has been far too long since you have received any sort of comfort therapy. Go and lie down while I retrieve my supplies." 

* * * * * 

The silence stretches wide and curving in the sun-drenched visitors' room of the expensive psychiatric hospital. It is broken by an old man shrieking, "My mother wants me to lie naked in the snow!" Vast picture windows and soothing art on the walls can't hide the fact that they're in a nuthouse--nuts have a way of making themselves heard. 

Abigail fingers her scarf and speaks up.

"I prefer blondes. No hunters. I like travel." 

Will blinks compulsively.

"What?"

He accidentally catches her eyes. Her gaze locks him in, the same way Dr. Lecter's does. _We are her parents now._

"I assume Dr. Lecter is trying to get me mated as quickly as possible, unless he intends to do it himself." 

Will is frozen, frowning at the floor and leaning against the squashy couch, each hand holding the opposite wrist. 

"I don't think Dr. Lecter's going to sell you off unless you want him to. I mated at your age, and Dr. Lecter doesn't approve of my marriage. I figured, after this…we'd send you to a good university, one with an omega residence. D'you…would you want that?" 

Abigail gives him a tremulous smile. Will can see the sun coming out behind her beautiful eyes, and he suddenly understands why her father would want to keep this child close to him. She is precious. 

"I like birds. Field biology is full of alpha-omega pairs. I could do research somewhere warm." 

The pendulum swings in Will's mind, and suddenly, he sees. He sits opposite Abigail and curls down over his knees.

"Do you know where the term 'stool pigeon' comes from?" he asks. 

Her eyes widen with understanding, but she quickly mutes it into attentive puzzlement. Clever girl.

"From when people would hunt passenger pigeons. They massacred so many of them…they went extinct within 200 years," she replies softly. Will nods. Of course she is the perfect student. He continues.

"The hunters would keep a few pet pigeons, trained to dance as though they were searching for food on the ground. Birds in the air would see them pecking at the ground and fly down to join them."

"And when they landed…they were killed," Abigail whispers. "The hunters killed all of them…except the stool pigeons." 

Will tries to speak more gently, imbuing his words with the depth of his empathy for Abigail. 

"They fitted them into little pigeon-sized boots attached to baskets so they couldn't fly away. If the stoolies got startled, the other birds would be able to tell, so the hunters sewed their eyes shut with silk threads. If they didn't _see_ any danger, they couldn't warn their kinfolk. They _couldn't_ , even if they wanted to." 

Abigail's small pale hand shoots out and catches two of Will's fingers, holding them tightly. It has been a long time since he has been touched by another omega. He had forgotten how fragile they were, how quickly their pulses leapt beneath their thin skin. 

"I never _saw_ anything," Abigail murmurs, pressing her lips together tightly. There are tears in her eyes. 

"I didn't-- I didn't-- Not the--the--I only ever danced when he told me to dance. That's all. That's _all_." 

Will takes her hand in both of his and holds it tightly. He doesn't move to embrace her. He knows that she longs to be held, remembers how it felt to be young and untouched, but this is for the best. It's better to leave her in her own space, so she has room to build up her shields. An omega's defenses will never be as strong as an alpha's, but at least they will belong to her alone. 

Will squeezes Abigail's hand.

"Your eyes were sewn shut then. You couldn't fly away. I won't let that happen to you again."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment because I need to regain control over this story. The tail is wagging the dog, by which I mean the metaphors are driving the plot.
> 
> References: 
> 
> _Surfaces and Essences_ by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
> 
> _A Feathered River across the Sky _by Joel Greenberg__


	8. Chapter 8

Tuesday evening's session starts out differently from the others. Will tells Dr. Lecter that he visited Abigail, and they discuss colleges with respected omega programs briefly, but the conversation never really takes off. Will is carefully guarding Abigail's secret, and Dr. Lecter seems to realize that Will is not going to open up this night. 

Instead, he instructs Will to take off his shirts and glasses and sit on the chaise longue. Will does so, wondering when it became so natural for him to follow Lecter's orders. He thinks it would be more difficult to make himself disobey them, now. 

Lecter removes his jacket and rolls up his sleeves to reveal muscular forearms. He slips a bottle of oil into his pocket and drags a physician's rolling stool over to Will's side. The man seems to have an endless collection of atypical furniture. Will imagines him stealing the stool from a hospital, dragging it out to his car in the middle of the night, and he grins to himself. 

"Are you going to give me a check-up, Dr. Lecter?" he asks softly. 

The doctor smiles and touches his hands lightly to Will's temples. 

"Not quite. And you may call me Hannibal, Will. Surely we are friends by now." 

He twinkles his eyes as though he is joking, but the slight twitch in one corner of his mouth indicates to Will his impatience. Dr. Lecter is eager for their relationship to progress toward deeper intimacies. Strange, Will thinks, when he already sits half-dressed and placid in the man's territory. How much more intimate could they get?

"Hannibal," he murmurs, and his true, bittersweet smile makes a rare appearance. His head is just so hot, and Hannibal's cold fingers feel like a benediction against his skin. 

"I am going to help you release some of the tension here," Hannibal explains as he massages lightly along Will's hairline. Whenever their sessions combine touch and talk, they both end up speaking in hushed voices. It's as though these moments take place in another universe, one step away from the rest of the world. If anyone were to open the door while Hannibal is touching him, they wouldn't be able to see anything at all. 

The doctor continues to palpate down the border of Will's face, catching inside the rim of his jawbones.

"Your lymph nodes are swollen, my friend. Have you had an infection recently? Toothache, earache?" 

"Nooo," Will answers, dropping his head just slightly so he can rub his cheek against Hannibal's hand. He thinks Hannibal won't notice, but of course he does, and tips Will's head back to center. "Just my headaches," Will adds. 

"The finest minds are often plagued by suffering," Hannibal sighs. He drops one arm to support Will's chest. "I'm going to manipulate your pressure points before I progress to your arms and back. The massage will be more effective if we release as much tension as possible beforehand." 

Will falls forward silently as Hannibal locates and rubs both of his occipital points simultaneously. It's like a drug, the endorphins flooding into his system under an alpha's fingertips. He knows it has to do with pheromones, but it has always seemed needlessly cruel that he can't get the same effect when he does it to himself. He curls himself further over Hannibal's arm. It's too much effort to shut his eyes completely, so he just watches a narrow strip of smudged-out color wave back and forth through his eyelashes. 

Slowly, Hannibal releases Will, helping him to brace himself against his own knees. He hears the doctor moving behind him, and then Hannibal grabs two large handfuls of trapezius muscle and _digs_ into the tightly knotted tissue. Will lets out a long, loud sigh that morphs into a whimper and then a moan. It's the kind of noise that Peter would mock him for, but Hannibal rumbles appreciatively and begins kneading outward. 

Will still feels so _hot_. He's having trouble with his boundaries again. Hannibal is rubbing across his shoulders with a fragrant, viscous oil. The progressive loosening of his muscles is making him feel like hot liquid is flowing through his insides, starting at his temples and trickling down his face, dripping off his chin and neck and spreading to every muscle Hannibal touches. 

The combination of these sensations and his own sweat convinces Will that he is melting, or somehow--releasing himself through his own pores. He goes back and forth on whether or not to mention it to Hannibal, before finally deciding that it's a pretty big problem. He slurs out, "Am I all wet?" 

Hannibal's breath catches in his throat and his voice sounds choked when he rasps, "Will?"

Will realizes his mistake when Hannibal's hands move down his back, under his waistband. He knows what Hannibal must be thinking, but he also feels very far away, and Hannibal is pretty determined to get Will's pants down and see for himself. He probably shouldn't stop an alpha on a mission. 

Hannibal is panting as he skillfully unfastens Will's belt and trousers and peels the fabric down. He dries one hand hastily on Will's abandoned shirt before sliding it inside Will's boxers and between his tight cheeks. Will feels Hannibal's disappointment like a blow when the alpha swipes a finger against his dry hole. Between his empathy disorder and the vulnerability he shares with Hannibal, Will begins to weep.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I'll never be able to give you what you want." 

Hannibal jerks Will's trousers back up and quickly moves to embrace him and brush away his tears. 

"Shh, darling, shh. We have this, and it is enough for me. There is only one way we could ever be together truly, and that is something I would never ask of you."

Will cries until he is through, and then Dr. Lecter cleans him up and watches him drink two glasses of water. When Will is all put together again, Dr. Lecter walks him to his car. He drives away feeling, as he often does, as though he has just exited a dream. 

* * * * * 

By the time Will goes downstairs after his lectures the next morning, his head is pounding again and he can already hear the science team arguing from down the hall. He hasn't been sleeping, and when he does, it's a strange zombielike state where he continues to move around his house. He pops two aspirin and enters the lab. 

"It's not even a body!" Zeller squawks as Will slips in quietly. "It's a pile of offal!" 

Price is poking gently at the slimy pool of tissue someone has kindly spread out across an autopsy table. He clips something off and seals it into a bag.

"Technically, a pile of offal would contain only the _in_ ternal organs. This killer left every part of the body except for--"

"The bones," Jack finishes grimly. "What do you think, Will?" 

The others look up. Price and Zeller merely nod in acknowledgement, but Beverly reels backward.

"Jesus, Will! Is it possible for you to smell any more like Dr. Lecter than you do right now?" 

Will smirks and adjusts his glasses downward.

"Maybe if I skinned him and wore him like a cloak." He chuckles to himself as the others scoff and complain.

Zeller speaks to the room as a whole. "Is he getting weirder? I think he's getting weirder." 

Jack growls, "Focus, people. Will, take a look at this. We haven't identified the body yet, but tissue samples suggest a Caucasian male alpha, thirties or forties, somewhat lower body mass than average." 

"A little bitty alpha," Price chuckles to himself. He and Z share a moment of beta solidarity as Zeller extracts most of the victim's liver. "Looks like we got ourselves a drinker!" 

Jack glances at the knobby organ. "That should help identify him. We'll start sorting through missing persons when we're done cataloguing what we've got." 

"Where was he found?" Will asks. He is staring at the long, shimmering trail of bloody mucus that connects the body to the liver that Z is still cradling in his gloved hands. 

Jack answers. "Sparrow's Point, on the beach. Murder took place offsite, Beverly is looking for any material that might've gotten mixed in with the remains. It's private property, but the owner is a widow who lives with her daughter in Ohio and visits once a year. She keeps the land for sentimental reasons." 

Will closes his eyes and presses his palms against the wall behind him. "The killer knew that, of course. Maybe not the woman specifically, but he knew which part of the beach was likely to be empty. He must have arranged for it to be found, if it's this fresh." 

Jack nods again and indicates a tray off to the side. "Estimated time of death is yesterday night, between 11 and 1 a.m. The killer left a trail of hand and finger bones leading all the way back to the public stretch of beach, where he lit a fire and left it burning. Local cops got the call around 3:30." 

Will steps over to examine the bones. "Like Hansel and Gretel," he murmurs. "But where does this trail lead?" 

"Hansel and Gretel burned the witch in the oven, right?" says Bev, pausing in her work. "Maybe this guy is the wicked witch?"

Will shakes his head. "No, I don't think so. _He_ wasn't thrown in the fire. Just deboned…like a fish." 

Will hears a rattling sound and looks down to see his hand trembling violently against the edge of the metal table. His vision slides in…and out…he hears Garrett Jacob Hobbs again… _see? See?_ Ocean water rushes into the lab, crashing, churning around Will's feet, whipping him in the face…

He feels hands, one gripping his neck, one pressed against his belly. A buzzing sound rises in his head, a thousand cicadas growing louder louder louder, until--

His head falls silent. He hears only himself panting and Beverly keeping up a low, soothing patter. He opens his eyes and sees only Price and Zeller, frozen in place, staring at him. His clothes are soaked through with sweat. He is cold. 

Jack strides back into the room. His cell phone looks tiny in his large hand.

"Couldn't get ahold of Lecter; must be with a patient. Called your alpha instead. He told me to put you in a taxi and he'll be home as soon as he can." 

Beverly hands Will over to Jack, but not before patting his neck gently and dipping her head to look into Will's eyes. 

"I'm your friend, Will. If you need help, call me. I won't judge." 

Will manages to crack a weak smile and nod his head. Beverly is a good person, but sometimes she's so earnest that it pains him. He doesn't like to drag good people into his disaster of a life. 

As Jack marches him out to the cab, he wonders what Hannibal would think of Beverly. It seems odd that he's never encouraged Will to make friends. In Will's experience, socialization is something that all psychiatrists press on him. He turns that knowledge over and tucks it into the Hannibal Lecter file in his mind. 

* * * * * 

When he gets home, Will gives the taxi driver all the cash he has on him and goes inside to take a shower and let the dogs out. Aside from a persistent sensation that he's being watched, he feels back to normal. He settles himself at his desk with his fishing lures.

Peter comes home at the same time he normally does, banging the door and immediately walking over to open the fridge. They don't greet each other, but after Peter is standing at the counter eating cold macaroni and cheese, he calls into the den.

"How come I got a call from your boss today?"

Will doesn't look up from his work.

"It was nothing. I got freaked out looking at a body and everybody overreacted. I'm only a delicate little omega, you know." 

Peter snorts and speaks with his mouth full.

"Cool. Hey, I made you appointments for tomorrow. You're getting fitted for a suit at the menswear place on Fremont at 4, and getting your hair cut at the salon in the mall at 5:30." 

Will fits a feather against his lure and holds it in place with his fingers while he begins to wind the thread. He watches the anger rising in his chest from a distance, with the calm premonition that things are about to explode. 

"Why?"

Peter clangs around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets and putting things in the dishwasher. 

"Uh, there's a huge charity gala--did you eat the last of the salmon?--huge gala on Friday, lots of important clients. Rebecca told me to dress up and "bring that homeless fisherman you call your husband." All you have to do is look pretty and sip champagne for four hours." 

Will ties off the thread and clips it neatly, then sets his tools aside.

"No," he says. He knows his voice carries into the kitchen, but Peter doesn't seem to register his words. Will tries again.

"I'm not going to some fancy ballroom so I can hang on your arm and smile at slimeballs." 

"'Course you're going," Peter returns calmly, walking barefoot into the den. "But for god's sake, don't smile at them. Their poor little omegas will have nightmares for weeks." 

Rather than making a face and demanding something in return, like he normally would have, Will turns toward his husband and stares down at his own hands. He can feel himself disassociating, and he watches in fascination as the hands switch rapidly from being his own to being a stranger's, over and over. 

"I'm not going," he repeats, his voice calm and flat. "You can't make me go." 

Peter has turned on the TV and is flipping channels, looking for basketball. Will notices that his undershirt is stained. 

"You're not getting another dog," Peter negotiates, still under the impression that this is one of their usual disagreements. "But you can try sleeping in the master bedroom again, if you want." 

Will takes off his glasses. It's easier to step outside his comfort zone when he can't see anything clearly. 

"Dr. Lecter diagnosed me with Neglected Omega Syndrome."

He lets the words hang in the air. Peter still hasn't caught on to what is happening. He squints at the television.

"Who's Dr. Lecter?"

Even after fifteen years, Will is still capable of being astonished by his husband's obliviousness. 

"My psychiatrist. The one I've been talking about for the past two months. The one who watched me _kill a man_. Do you even listen when I talk?"

His voice is rising higher, breaking the aura of foreboding calm that he had wrapped himself in. Peter glances at him for the first time since he entered the room. He looks annoyed.

"I know who he is, I just forgot his name, that's all. What does he have to do with you being a brat?" 

Will's words come out clipped, like they always do when he is struggling to maintain his stability.

"He's diagnosed me with Neglected Omega Syndrome. That means you've committed a crime. If I tell him I want to go forward with pressing charges, you'll be put on probation. A social worker will visit the house to make sure you're treating me right…and you won't be allowed to leave the state." 

Peter rises from the couch at that, and growls, lower and louder than Will has ever heard him. It occurs to him suddenly that he's forgotten to be afraid of his mate. He's forgotten, and now he's going to pay.

But all Peter does is grip Will tightly around his upper chest and pull him backwards, so his back is pressed to Peter's front. He can feel the growl rattling through his body, and Peter's fingers are leaving bruises in his shoulder. The growl cuts off as the alpha hisses in his ear.

"All this because you want more cuddles? You're willing to ruin our lives, make me lose my _job_ , because you want a _hug_? You're pathetic, you know that? Pitiful."

Will is trembling too hard to speak. Peter releases him for a second, only to grab him by his throat and his hip bone, under his shirt.

"You think you've got a trump card, little boy, but you _don't_. You and I? We're not _in_ the government's computers. They can't track us. You try to have me arrested, we'll be over the border in Canada with new names before you can say Jack Robinson, and this time, I'll keep you locked up in the house like I should've from the start. You'll _never_ see your precious psychiatrist again. You hear me?" 

Will is crying, choking on his own fear, although Peter's grip isn't tight enough to harm him. The alpha shakes him by his neck. 

"I said, _did you hear me?_ "

Gasping and hiccuping, Will manages to say, "Yes. Yes, god, I hear you." 

Peter releases him instantly and wipes his hands on his pants. 

"Great. Tell the barber I want your hair off your forehead and ears, but still long enough to curl a little." 

He sits back down on the couch and turns up the volume on his game, raising his eyebrows as if daring Will to comment. As Will stumbles into the guest bedroom, motioning the dogs up onto the bed with him, it occurs to him that Peter still hasn't actually forbidden him from seeing Hannibal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really want to thank everyone who commented on the last chapter. You guys motivated me to continue writing basically every free moment since then, so you're the reason this chapter is early and long. Also, 10000 points to werewolf-of-the-east on tumblr, who supplied me with the word 'placid' when I was losing my mind. 
> 
> I decided to screw myself over by including actual lymph nodes in a universe where I had borrowed some of their locations for omega pressure points. Don't worry about it. 
> 
> The other mysteries in this chapter will be explained later. It'll be okay, for a value of okay that includes a cannibalistic serial killer.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It takes a lot to make me sick to my stomach. This chapter reached that level. Trigger warning for animal cruelty. Hannibal's dish is made up by me and not representative of Lithuanian cuisine. The other dish discussed was described by a journalist who claims to have been given this precise recipe by a businessman on a train in Vietnam. My subsequent internet searches were seriously lacking in information, but I am inclined to believe Mr. Drollette nonetheless. There exist horrors of which the internet knows not. 
> 
> I continue to love each one of you and treasure your comments, especially when you suggest ways for me to kill my characters. 
> 
> Reference book: _Gold Rush in the Jungle_ by Dan Drollette Jr.

Will wakes the next morning at 4:30 a.m. He's standing in his ditch in the back yard, in his underwear. The hole is now at least four feet deep. He looks for a shovel, and when he doesn't see one, he realizes that his hands hurt. They're caked with mud and blood, and all of his fingernails are worn down to nothing. Winston is scratching at the back door, trying to get out to Will. He gives his faithful friend a hug, then scrubs himself clean in the shower.

He takes advantage of being up before dawn to move mechanically through his routines without seeing or smelling his husband. His day is, unfortunately, completely packed: lectures, then lab work, then _appointments_ , then Hannibal. He concentrates on making it through each minute, which would be easier if time would stop skipping the fuck around. 

He is…not well. He can admit that to himself now, and he has resolved to be completely honest with Hannibal this evening, but it's hell trying to hide it from everyone else. Voices keep zooming towards or away from him, with a disorienting Doppler effect, and he almost faints when he turns around and smells the exact signature of one of the creepiest paraphiliacs he'd ever profiled. He's aware that his hands shake throughout his lecture, although he keeps his voice steady. He pretends as hard as he can that he is not sweating through his clothing and dares the students to say anything. 

In fact, two students hang around his desk after class. He ignores them, and one goes away, but the other steps forward boldly and clasps his elbow. He looks at her shoulder and concentrates on the highlights in her thick blonde braid.

"Professor Graham, I think you're very ill. Your scent…I haven't smelled anything like it since my brother came home from the Peace Corps with parasites. Please allow me to accompany you to the hospital." 

Will tugs his elbow free, ostensibly so he can pack up his briefcase. He never bothers to learn any of his students' names, but he knows this one as an eager Good Person who always does her reading. Right now, all that's registering is an alpha standing between him and what he wants to do, which is go to the bathroom and drown himself. So he repeats a line that a winking teacher taught him in middle school sex ed. 

"Thank you so much for your concern, Alpha. I'll do just as you suggest." 

His teacher swore that it disarmed pushy alphas enough that you could usually slip away before they came to their senses. It doesn't work this time. She catches him again as he turns away from her. He contemplates threatening a harassment suit, but he knows it wouldn't go through. She is well within her rights to detain an omega, if she believes him to be in danger. 

" _Stop,_ Professor Graham," she commands, and he stops. She switches instantly to a soothing, patronizing tone. "I know you're very sick, and I know this must be frightening for you--"

"I'll take it from here. You should go to class." 

Thank the devil for Alana Bloom. She must be a good four inches shorter than the student, but it's all about hierarchy, and Alana has far more clout than any trainee. She sways her hips as she walks, drawing both of their gazes to the way her clingy wrap dress displays her figure. The trainee makes one last stand.

"Dr. Bloom, Professor Graham is sick. I was just telling him--"

Alana interrupts again. "I said I've got it now." Blushing, the student slips out the door. Will manages a bleary grin in Alana's direction. 

"I haven't seen you go all Alpha Queen since the last time Freddie Lounds camped out in the staff parking lot." 

Alana comes around the desk and smiles softly at Will, cupping his fuzzy chin. 

"I don't know what you're talking about. I'm a psychiatrist. I would never use my dynamic to intimidate anyone." 

Will huffs and lets his eyelids droop. Long before he met Hannibal, Alana was his Alpha Psychiatrist Friend, although she's much more into _boundaries_ than Hannibal. He instinctively reacts to her like a dog seeking affection. 

"She's right, you know," Alana murmurs as she pets Will. "You're not well." 

Will hums in response. Alana removes her hand and he looks up, betrayed. 

"This thing with Hannibal is becoming unhealthy, Will. It's meant to be a stepping stone toward greater intimacy with your partner, but instead, you're fracturing yourself--your mind has grown dependent on Hannibal while your body remains bound to Peter." 

Will reaches, rather anxiously, for one of Alana's beautifully manicured hands, and she allows him to cling to that bit of skin contact. His voice is rough, as though it belongs to a different person than the semi-competent Quantico lecturer he's been for the last three hours. 

"You're the one who recommended him in the first place." 

Alana sighs. 

"And I regret that now. I had no idea you'd become so attached--frankly, I had no idea _Hannibal_ would become so attached. He should be enforcing healthy limits and encouraging you to seek out your spouse for comfort, but it's clear that he's not capable of doing that with you. Maybe you ought to see a beta specialist…" 

Will chuckles darkly. 

"I don't think that would help. Not to be sexist, but I don't think betas should be allowed to specialize in the other dynamics. They don't know anything about us." 

He can feel the weight of Alana's reproving glare, but it's comforting somehow. This is the kind of thing she would have lectured him on before…before everything got weird.

"And all child psychiatrists should be children, is that it?" 

Will chances a glance at Alana's eyes and smiles slightly at her gentle expression. She knows what she's doing; she's granting him the gift of their old casual companionship. 

"Yeah, that's right. And all profilers should be murderers, all marine biologists should be dolphins…" 

Alana laughs out loud and Will hides his grin, feigning seriousness.

"I'm not kidding, dolphins are very intelligent. Without delphine input, I question the validity of the entire field of aquatic mammalian research." 

Alana grows quiet, rubbing Will's shoulder contemplatively. 

"I can hardly blame Hannibal, you know. You're irresistible." 

Will looks up at her, his blue eyes wide and truly puzzled. 

"What do you mean?" 

She sighs and runs her hand through her hair. 

"I mean… You're beautiful, Will, and brilliant and fragile, and you've been treated very badly, for long enough that you've grown to expect it. I can smell the scents of at least half a dozen alphas on your shoulders and arms--everyone who sees you yearns to take care of you, even the impenetrable Hannibal Lecter." 

Will backpedals out of that conversation as quickly as he can.

"You've got it backwards," Will says, smiling to let her know he's kidding. "I'm using Hannibal as a stepping stone to get over my infatuation with you, and he's using me to avoid thinking about his forbidden love for you. Seems to me _you're_ the irresistible one." 

Alana leans back against the wall, looking shrewd. There's something so reliable about her beauty. Will understands it. 

"And here I always thought you saw me as a parental figure, though I never knew if you wanted me as a replacement for your mother or your father." 

Will peers at her sideways from around his glasses' frame. 

"Careful, Alana. You're getting dangerously close to psychoanalyzing your own life, now." 

She sighs and gives him a one-armed hug. 

"I can smell Peter on you, for once. Is he at least making an effort?" 

Will laughs to stop himself from crying. 

"I, ah, tried to disobey an order last night. He restrained me in order to threaten me. It was kind of like being hugged, I guess." 

"Will, if he's abusing you, you need to turn him in! There's a system set in place for situations like this. If he won't go to therapy voluntarily, then there's court-ordered rehab, halfway housing, supervised visits…"

Will shakes his head and backs away from Alana. 

"No. No. He doesn't beat me, Alana. I'm not being starved. He hasn't chained me to the radiator. If I take this to court, I'll lose, and then where will I be? You know how rarely these things work out in the omega's favor." 

"Will, you have three well-respected alphas on your side, two of us psychiatrists, _and_ you work in law enforcement. Between Hannibal, Jack, and I, we'll make sure you're treated fairly." 

Will is forced to use another omegan evasive measure he'd mastered as a young teenager. Rolling his shoulders in toward his chest and bending his knees, he presses close against the wall and shimmies under Alana's arm, all the while murmuring, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I have to go look at someone's guts now, sorry, Alpha, excuse me, sorry." 

Combine extreme deference with movement away from the situation, his teacher had advised, and most alphas will be unwilling to stop you by force. It works, as it has so often in the past. Alana calls after him, but she doesn't follow him down the hall, and he makes it to his lab safely. He doubts it will be the last he hears of the matter; Alana is sure to try to recruit Jack and Hannibal to her cause.

* * * * *

The rest of the team is just setting up, pulling on their lab coats and tucking away their coffees and protein bars. 

"Anything new?" Will asks. He sets himself up off to the side, outside the orbit of the others, as he usually does. The team has been together for over six months now, and they all came in at the same time from different places, but still, Will has ended up the outsider looking in. Despite Jack and Beverly's attempts to engage him, he is unable to transmute himself into something that would meld with the group chemistry. As he often reminds Peter, he has trouble being "sociable." 

Jack answers. 

"We got a name and profile for the victim, at least. Dennis Huxley, age 44, 5'9", 168 pounds. He worked for Apple--apparently his job was to convince companies to buy iphones for all their employees."

Will edges slowly closer to the table where Mr. Huxley's remains are once more spread out. It is impossible to ignore the parallels between the victim and his own husband. "Spouse?" he asks.

Jack continues. "Miss Alejandra Lourdes, current age 28, was placed in foster care when she was 11 years old. Huxley lifted her out of the system for a nominal fee when she was 16. She is now a biochemist working for Philmont Pharmaceuticals. After we ID'd the body early this morning, paramedics arrived at the house to take her to the hospital. They describe her general mood as "shaken but relieved."" 

"It's about me," Will says softly. Everyone looks at him. 

"The other stuff--the bones and the fire and everything--that was just for fun. He was _playing_. The real design is hidden in the victim. A small alpha salesman? An omega bought cheaply at a young age who now has a successful career and resents her husband? That's me. He found…analogues to us." 

Beverly speaks up, still wearing her protective goggles.

"It could be a coincidence, Will. I mean, they looking nothing like you two. Huxley was dark-haired with big hound dog eyes, Lourdes is a tiny Latina woman…that doesn't exactly fit your profile." 

Will shakes his head and pinches his eyes closed. 

"It's not about that, not about looks. He wasn't being _subtle_. He chose them because _my alpha works for Philmont._ Just in case I didn't see it, just in case I didn't notice--the omega works for the same company as him." 

Jack claps a hand on his shoulder, and Will shrinks away from him, remembering what Alana said about everyone wanting to take care of him. He just wants Hannibal. 

"So if this is about you, what does he want? How do we catch him?" 

Will sighs, and allows himself to slip briefly into the shoes of the killer. 

_I've left him another present, since he liked my first one so well. A fun new way to kill, and he won't be able to resist the analogy, even if he tries. He'll see his husband as he ought to be, a pile of rubbish, and when he meets the young woman, he'll see how happy he himself could be._

Will opens his eyes and speaks aloud, shuddering and resisting the urge to vomit. "He's…uh…I think it's the copycat." 

"The copycat who doesn't exist?" asks Price, dubiously.

"He exists!" Will hisses. "And he probably kills all the time. No pattern, because it's not a compulsion, it's a hobby…was Huxley missing any organs?" 

"I only found one kidney," Zeller says, "but I'm not willing to call the other one a trophy. The body's a mess; it could have ended up anywhere." 

"It's the copycat," Will says, pulling away from Jack and hugging himself. "He took the kidney, and he wants me to visit Alejandra Lourdes. He wants me to see how happy I could be." 

* * * * *

Will moves through his afternoon in a thick fog of blood and bodies. All the deaths of the last few months appear out of the mists to reenact themselves over and over again. He thrusts Elise Nichols onto the antler wall…watches the points break through again, again. He shoots Garrett Jacob Hobbs…and shoots him again and again. When his gun is empty, the scene starts anew.

"You're Dr. Lecter's, then?" The clerk who is measuring him sounds as though he's asked the question several times. 

"Huh?" Will asks eloquently.

The other omega springs to his feet and cinches his measuring tape around Will's neck.

"Dr. Lecter? He used to come here before the new owners took over. The guy who used to run this place died two years ago, and Lecter never came around after that. Bit morbid, I guess." 

Will holds out his arms when directed, and speaks while the man is doing something behind him.

"Dr. Lecter has never shied away from the morbid." He doesn't correct the assumption that Hannibal is his alpha. 

* * * * * 

When Will arrives at Hannibal's office that evening, he finds that another piece of improbable furniture has appeared in the room. He briefly entertains the idea that Hannibal has an old-fashioned manservant who does things like move miniature solid oak dining tables in and out of office spaces. 

The psychiatrist is dressed even more flamboyantly than usual: he is wearing a silk shirt and tie in the exact same shade of pale gold, and his inky black suit is shot through with threads of scarlet and gold. His pocket square is a dark red with irregular sable markings. It looks like nothing so much as a blood-drenched rag. 

Hannibal is setting the table for dinner. Will's vision grays out around the edges and then sharpens in on the tableau. The corpse of Cassie Boyle has been arranged upon her bed of antlers. Her flesh is dressed with fruit and sauces, and Hannibal reaches into her chest, withdraws her heart, and offers it to Will. When Will doesn't respond, can't respond, Hannibal bites into the organ himself, and rivulets of blood flow down his wrist. The liquid traces itself against Hannibal's own veins like iron filings scattered over a magnetic field. Will sees. 

"Will? Are you alright? I would be honored if you would join me for dinner." 

Will squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. Cassie Boyle is still on the table, a pomegranate resting in one clawed hand. He closes his eyes again. This time, he sees that Dr. Lecter has pulled out his chair and is gesturing for him to sit. Though Will still doesn't recognize the food (meat, herbs, sauce, something leafy, something golden), it no longer appears to be Cassie Boyle. Will can't remember if his eyes are open or shut. 

"Sit, dear Will. Eat." 

He sits, and hunches cautiously over his plate. He can't calculate the probability that this is a hallucination (it feels like one, but that no longer means anything), so he judges it wise to cling to the reality with the fewest dead people. 

He changes his mind when Dr. Lecter begins to describe the meal. 

"The meat was procured for me by a gentleman who imports rare delicacies into the United States for select customers. I first ate this dish as a young man in Lithuania, but when I tried to recreate it, I found that this type of veal production was banned in North America. You see, it is actually a bovine fetus, removed from its mother exactly two weeks prior to delivery and then soaked for 48 hours in a mixture of two part mother's milk and one part mother's blood. It creates a unique flavor and tenderness that can be found in no other meat." 

Will pauses briefly, then continues to eat. The cow fetus is already dead, and it's fucking delicious. The last thing he ate was a ham and cheese Hot Pocket. He catches Dr. Lecter's eyes for a moment. The alpha looks as though he's waiting for something, but thoroughly content in the meantime. 

"Seems a bit cruel, Doctor," Will murmurs. "Most alphas try to prove their superiority by eating the biggest, toughest animal out there. You went the opposite direction." 

Dr. Lecter takes a sip of his wine. 

"I traveled extensively before I settled here. In the jungles of Vietnam, I met a certain powerful alpha, part guerilla general, part cult leader. She displayed for me a dish I had believed to be an urban legend. Her soldiers brought in a large monkey, tightly bound and with its mouth wired shut. They placed the creature beneath a table so that its head protruded through a circular hole in the center. The warlord's omega knelt at her feet. The alpha removed the top of the monkey's skull, leaving its brain intact and very much alive. We were each given a thin, sharp blade and a bowl of wine. We took turns removing slivers of raw, living brain, soaking them in our wine, and eating them. The alpha who had arranged our gathering took this rare meat in her fingers and fed it to her mate. Do you see why she did this?" 

Not only does Will see, he empathizes. "Instead of the usual trials an alpha endures...danger, expense, trouble…she was saying, "I will spare no _cruelty_ to give the best to what is mine."" 

Hannibal smiles proudly and tips his glass to Will. Will grins into his plate. 

"I dunno, Doctor. Telling that story in this situation…makes the veal look a bit insignificant. If you really loved me, you'd feed me live monkey brains." 

Hannibal walks around the table and takes Will's face gently in his hands. 

"Oh my dear. What makes you think I will not do it yet?" 

Will means to respond, but he forgets himself and allows his eyes to drift closed. The momentary darkness scrambles reality again, with a screeching, blood-curdling jolt. Will is suddenly aware of being bound tightly, his head poking through a table. A laughing Asian woman says something he doesn't understand and reaches toward him with a bone saw…

Before he blacks out, he hears a voice.

_Shh, shh. It's just a mild seizure, my love._


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Graphic violence, rape threats, use of the c-word (I'm sorry, I hate that word, but it was super necessary.). 
> 
> The man Will meets looks like [Sendhil Ramamurthy](http://without-a-license.tumblr.com/post/59160154185/lyssissherlocked-those-dead-frenchboys-and). That's my tumblr, by the way. You can ask me questions on there if you don't have an AO3 account yet. I probably won't answer them, though. For some reason I find tumblr asks really intimidating.
> 
> I stole a section of Will's speech from Season 1, episode 1. If you haven't noticed yet, I just regurgitate stuff I see and read into this story. There's really no controlling it.

Will feels the warm sunlight shining through his eyelids before he wakes. For a moment, he as content as a lizard, and then he realizes that he always keeps his shades drawn. When he opens his eyes, he is momentarily dazzled by the brightness. He sees a pentagonal window of sky framed by the trees in his backyard, which seem taller than they usually are. Maybe he's sleepwalked into someone else's yard. A pink-brown female cardinal streaks out of a tree, and a male follows her so quickly it looks like she is dragging a red tail behind her. 

Will sits up, and a thick coverlet of sun-warmed dirt slumps off of him in one heavy sheet, leaving him shivering. He's at the bottom of his grave, which is now at least eight feet deep. The sun hasn't quite managed to burn off the morning fog, which means it isn't yet nine o'clock. Doesn't matter, anyway. He doesn't teach on Fridays. Maybe he should go to the lab. Jack's probably left messages on his cell phone.

The hole quickly fills with lukewarm creek water, and Will fights his natural buoyancy to stay cross-legged at the bottom. Abigail and Garrett Jacob Hobbs are down here. They're playing a game. Abigail is only a little girl. She serves Will a teacup full of blood and he realizes he won't make it to the top before he runs out of air. 

"See? See?" Garrett Jacob Hobbs asks excitedly.

" _Your_ eyes weren't closed, were they," Abigail reprimands him. Will throws her against the antler wall and Garrett Jacob Hobbs laughs and laughs. He is still laughing when Will slits him down the middle and yanks out his entire skeleton in one piece. He crawls into the corpse's belly and whispers, "You are my becoming. You are my becoming." 

* * * * * 

When Will arrives at Hannibal's office, he is covered head to foot in mud and blood. He doesn't remember whose blood it is. He doesn't remember how he got here. His mind is spinning tricks on him and Hannibal is his only anchor.

When Hannibal opens the door, he ushers Will insides and spreads a piece of plastic sheeting across one of the couches before lifting Will under the arms and setting him on top of it. He doesn't ask Will any questions and he doesn't reassure him. Instead, he leaves several voicemails, canceling appointments, and then retrieves what look to be heavy-duty cleaning supplies. He retraces Will's steps out into the waiting room, eliminating all the evidence from his carpet. He even straightens to clean the spot where Will steadied himself on the lintel. Before Hannibal leaves his sight, he orders, "Don't move." Will doesn't. 

After some amount of time (the clock has changed from 12:98 to 30:30), Hannibal returns. 

"Everything is clean except for you. What did you do?"

The alpha changes his blue rubber gloves for a fresh set and begins to slice off Will's clothing with trauma shears. Will is surprised to see some clean pink skin on his chest and belly. He figured he'd be marked with blood and mud all through. 

"I don't know," he says in a monotone. To his shame, tears prick at his eyes. "Something is wrong with me. What I see…it doesn't match with my memories, or with what I scent…Please. Please just tell me what's real." 

Hannibal scrubs him with a solution that makes Will's skin burn. He thinks it might contain bleach. The doctor speaks. 

"You called me this morning and said you'd figured something out. That Jack had found another body, similar to the boneless man. You said you'd put the clues together and discovered that the killer was someone you knew. You seemed…not entirely lucid. I encouraged you to come here to see me before taking any rash action, but you insisted that you had seen your alpha covered in the man's blood. You hung up on me and did not answer when I called you again." 

Will swallows. He feels as though his brain matter is transmuting into a gas and swirling farther and farther from the center of him. Hannibal smells like bleach and murder and home and Will is so confused. "Peter killed them?" he asks skeptically. 

Hannibal takes a fresh cloth and begins to clean Will's face. "That is your gift, not mine, sweet one. You told me that he killed them, and I believe you. The husband you described to me is a classic psychopath, incapable of emotion or remorse." 

Hannibal pulls Will to his feet and spins him around to wipe down his back. His hands rest on Will's ribcage, just as they had after he had killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs. 

"If Peter lives, he will blame you. He'll say you planned the murders, and the jury will believe him. Do you still have your gun?" 

Hannibal lifts Will off the plastic sheeting again and begins to dress him. His clothes, but they smell only of Hannibal. Why does a psychiatrist need plastic sheeting and stain remover that can treat blood? Why does he have a spare set of Will's clothes in his office?

"I never had a gun," Will says, wrinkling his brow. Hannibal starts to button Will's shirt. Will's head buzzes painfully and suddenly the shirt is buttoned and the doctor is slipping his arms through a vest.

"This morning you told me you had a gun." 

Will looks down. There's a gun in his hand. The safety is on and it is loaded. He tucks it down the back of his pants. Hannibal switches out his vest for a jacket that covers the bulge. 

The doctor removes a penlight from his pocket and begins to move it quickly between Will's eyes while he examines his pupils. 

"Listen to me, dear Will. Have you studied the case of Abel Gideon?"

Will blinks reflexively, repeatedly, but he can't block out the light.

"Studied him? I wrote a journal article about him," he mumbles. "Psychopath, beta with alpha tendencies. Hormone disorder. Killed his wife and her entire birth family." 

Hannibal puts the penlight away and begins to apply an oily, pungent ointment to Will's torn and bloody fingers.

"That's right. Peter _is_ Abel Gideon. He is planning to kill myself, Abigail Hobbs, and Alana Bloom. If they do not catch him in time, he will proceed to kill all of your colleagues at the FBI. He plans to kill you and your dogs last. Do you understand? He _will_ kill them." 

"The dogs?" Will whimpers. "No, no, they're perfectly house-trained. They never bother Peter at all. They're _my_ dogs." 

Hannibal pinches Will's occipital pressure points and he blacks out.

* * * * *

Will is standing in his kitchen. He does not know when he got here. He does not know the date or month or year or hour. His clothes smell like Dr. Lecter. He scrubs his hands over his face. At least three days growth of his patchy beard. That tells him…something. 

He checks the wall calendar. It's December 1998. That isn't right. Is that right? No, it's July. Either June or July or August of some year that is not 1998. He shoves his hand down his pants and pokes and prods his own genitals. Whatever year it is, he's only one or two weeks away from his heat. He'll have to go visit Thomas in prison. Ugh. 

The doorbell rings. It's a bouncy young beta. She hands him a suit in a plastic cover and asks him to sign for it. He thinks he might be in a movie, because she doesn't seem like a real person. She tells him, "Better shave off that beard before you wear the suit, huh?" He stands in his doorway, holding the suit and frowning, long after she has driven away.

He feeds his dogs. He eats a bowl of cereal. He watches the suit. It doesn't change. He's supposed to go to a party tonight. With Peter and the suit. 

He takes the dogs outside. They do change. First they are running around, then they are dead, then they are playing again, then Will is killing them, then Maggie is whining to go inside. Will lets her in. She'll want back out in a minute or two. She can never make up her mind.

He looks down into his ditch. That changes, too. First it's full of water, then it's empty, then Will is in there digging up bodies, then Will's dead body lies at the bottom, then it goes down so deep he can't see the bottom. Then he sees a dead stag in it. The stag doesn't go away. It does blink at him. It grows and un-grows feathers. Someone shot it in the head, then stabbed it repeatedly in the head. A crime of passion. 

Will goes inside. He shaves his face. He puts on his suit. 

* * * * * 

The charity dinner is not going well, but Will doesn't think his behavior is noticeably worse than it usually is at these sorts of events. He keeps losing track of himself and listing up to unmated alphas. Maybe it's his upcoming heat. He bumps his forehead against the arm of a tall Indian man with thick curly black hair. The man breaks off what he was saying and twinkles down at Will. Those twinkly eyes remind him of someone. 

"Oh, hello there, little one. Too much to drink? Who do you belong to, pretty boy?" 

Rather than pressing his fingers against Will's scent glands and then bringing them to his own nose, which would have been appropriate, the man bends at the waist and actually touches his nose to Will's neck. Will shivers deliciously. He feels…not wet, but sort of _tingly_. It's the first time he's really _noticed_ a handsome man in years. 

The man wraps one arm around Will, rubbing his shoulder lightly with his thumb. "Such a light scent," he tsks. "Still, I think I can find your alpha. Excuse me, I'll be right back," he adds, to his group. "Come on, sweet thing. Let's get you back where belong, before I get myself into trouble." He winks at Will. 

Will looks up at him with the blank, trusting face that alphas find so compelling. The man isn't actually expecting him to say anything at all. He's treating Will like a pet or a baby, something that is spoken to and cared for, but not conversed with. Will can't figure out if that bothers him. 

The crowd blurs together and the noise blends into a sound something like a babbling brook before the man locates Peter. He's actually doing his job, it looks like, chatting up some hospital honcho. "Hey," Will's man says aggressively. Peter glances at them and then continues what he was saying. 

" _Hey!_ " the man says, louder. "Hey, asshole, you need to keep a better eye on your omega." Peter sneers at him and tries to ignore them again, but his conversational partner has disengaged and is now looking at Will with some concern in her eyes. 

"Will's a big boy," Peter responds coolly. "He can keep himself out of trouble for a few minutes." 

The man snorts in disbelief and hugs Will closer. "Seriously, man? The poor boy is _drunk_. He has a _fever_. He's approaching heat, in a crowd of strangers, smells like you haven't touched him in a month… God, people like you shouldn't be allowed to _have_ omegas. Who the hell signed off on your marriage license?" 

Now the doctor really looks upset. She gives Peter a scandalized up-and-down before pulling a bottle of Aspirin out of her purse and slipping two into Will's mouth. 

"You need to take your husband home, Mr. Carwin," she says sternly. "He ought to be in bed, not out drinking." 

"Don't tell me what to do with my own mate!" Peter snarls, taking hold of Will's wrist and tugging him away from the nice man. "Either of you! You have no idea what a manipulative little bitch he is! I told him he had to come with me tonight, so he decided to get drunk and make the worst of it!" 

He drags Will out of the ballroom by his wrist, ignoring the protests of the other two alphas. Will's shoulders bump roughly against the other guests; he is unable to keep up with Peter's pace. He feels the cold steel of the gun against his lower back again. That's funny. He could have sworn it wasn't there when the nice man was cooing at him. 

* * * * * 

Peter doesn't speak to him the entire way home, but he is radiating fury. They pull into the garage and he drags Will into the house, throws him up against the fridge. 

"What the fuck is wrong with you, you obnoxious little cunt! Do you not get that this is my _fucking job_ , Will? Y'know, the thing they pay me money to do? Jesus fucking christ, I shoulda raped your hot little ass and then pushed you outta the car, left you on the side of the road before we bonded. _FUCK_ , you ruin _everything!_ " 

Will pulls out his gun and aims it at Peter's face. The alpha stumbles back against the sink and raises his hands in a placating gesture. "Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa, babe. Put that thing down." 

Will speaks for the first time all night. 

"I shoot my victim expertly through the neck." 

He shoots. 

"This is not a fatal wound. The bullet misses every artery. He is paralyzed before it leaves his body. Which does not mean he can't feel pain. It just means he can't do anything about it. This is my design." 

Peter slumps against the cabinets. He is staring wide-eyed at Will, but of course he cannot speak. Blood seeps out from him into a dark, heavy puddle. Will selects a weapon from their knife block. He tosses it into the air and catches it by the handle.

"I sharper the butcher knife before carving into the victim." The knife snicks through the metal sharpener. _One. Two. Three._

"I begin by removing his antlers. He does not deserve them." Will scalps Peter easily, slicing through skin and fat and hair before peeling back the flaps, one on each side, to reveal his skull. 

"I attempt to dig the point of my knife into the sutures between the skull bones. The knife slips and I fail, leaving marks across the bone. _One. Two. Three._ "

Will looks around, trying to figure out how to pry Peter's skull open without damaging his brain too much. He opens a drawer full of rarely used utensils with his bloody hands and hits upon a solution. 

He grabs a sharp two-tined fork and a heavy rubber mallet. 

"I set the fork along the center of my victim's skull, and tap the tines in with the mallet, like a sculptor chiseling away marble." 

Peter's bones crack much more easily than marble. A fissure appears, and Will uses his fingers and his makeshift chisel to pry the bone apart. It cracks much more easily now that it has already been broken once, and Will manages to expose most of the top of Peter's brain to open air. He steps back. 

Peter is still slumped against the cabinets, obviously dead now. Will wonders when that happened. Will hopes he didn't die before his skull was cracked open. That would be disappointing. He looks small and worthless and fat, with his little belly pushed out and his brain hanging open. Will steps forward one more time and drives his fork into Peter's eyes, marking them with Xs. He drops his tools and straightens back up.

"This is my design." 

* * * * * 

Will feels a euphoric sexuality rising in him as he gathers his hounds and leads the little pack outside. He hasn't felt this way since he was a teenager. This is the power alphas fear: an omega unbound. He leaps down into his grave and lifts the dogs down after him, one by one. They leap up on him to lick away Peter's blood and Will falls over onto his back, his head pillowed on the stag's belly. He laughs himself to sleep.


	11. Chapter 11

"Baltimore PD, put your hands in the air!" 

Will stumbles to his feet, halfheartedly lifting his hands above his head. 

"What the fuck?" 

He's in a fucking massive grave with a dead deer. Some nutjob hacked away at it, and stinks like a swamp corpse. Will steps backward and almost vomits as his bare foot sinks into soft, dead flesh. A maggot flops over his toe. Winston woofs loyally. 

"Call off the dogs!" the police officer barks nervously. 

Will squints at him. "Seriously? They're lazy ass mutts, they're not gonna hurt you." 

The officer looks like he might be panicking. His gun arm wavers slightly. "Stop messing around and call off the damn dogs! We seen what you did in there." 

Will whistles and gestures sharply to the ground. All his pups lay down like the good dogs they are. He hears a female officer chastising the one who'd been shouting. The previous night is coming back to him in bits and pieces. 

The female officer tosses down a rope, and Will begins to climb. When he reaches the top, she handcuffs his arms behind his back.

"Will Graham, you're under arrest for the murder of your husband, Peter Carwin." 

Will bares his teeth at her. "Didn't you go to school? An omega can't kill its mate. Besides, the man in that house isn't Peter Carwin, and he sure as hell isn't my husband anymore. I'm _unmated_." 

He wriggles his hips slightly and allows his desire to rise off of him in waves. God, he hasn't felt this fucking horny since he was a teenager. He could ride his arresting officer right here, next to the grave, and then just wait for back-up to arrive… He gets lost in a fantasy in which Baltimore PD sends an endless stream of alphas in uniform for him to fuck. 

The police officer rattles his cuffs, and Will snaps his eyes back up to her face. She doesn't smell turned on. She must've planned for him. Lidocaine in her nostrils, probably. 

"You don't actually have to agree to your warrant, Graham," she says dryly. Then she gestures to the dead deer in the ditch. "But I can also arrest you for hunting without a license." 

Will laughs. He laughs so hard he falls to his knees, tears rolling down his cheeks. He laughs so hard his stomach aches, and he begins to choke, and then to vomit. He laughs so hard he vomits up a human ear. He recognizes the tiny emerald stud in the lobe.

The last thing he hears before he passes out is the beta officer squealing, "What the _fuuuuuck_!" 

* * * 

Will comes to in a sterile white room. He assesses the situation slowly, his head still swimming. People are moving and murmuring around him, but he doesn't hear noise coming from the hallway, like he would in a hospital. Some sort of inmate infirmary, maybe, but much nicer than what he imagines the general population experiences. Secure ward in a private hospital seems most likely.

There are no windows. His wrists and ankles are bound loosely to the metal bed frame with discreet cotton ties. They must think that he's too weak to mount a serious escape attempt. Will lifts his head, and it thunks heavily back against the mattress. No escaping, then. 

A man comes to stand near him. Beta, tall, with serious dark eyebrows and a purposely neutral expression. 

"Please confirm your name and birthdate for me, Mr. Graham." 

Will snorts. The doctor's face doesn't change. Not a joke, then. 

"Will Graham. 2-17-1981." 

The doctor actually turns his wrist to check the bracelet there. Will's curiosity gets the better of him and he makes eye contact, briefly. 

_I'll do everything by the book, not gonna let him get off on a technicality, not again, after what he did, he won't go free because of me, I won't make any mistakes with this monster…_

Will squeezes his eyes shut. He begins to grind his teeth, doing his best to create enough static to white out his empathy. The doctor walks him through a basic medical exam, jotting things down on a clipboard. No computers near prisoners. 

Then the questions get strange. The doctor calls over a guard, who unties Will's right hand. He is instructed to draw a clock. Will does so. 

An echo rises up in his mind… _Draw a clock for me, Will. Good boy…_ The memory smells like something… He can't catch hold of it. A dream?

"I said, when did your most recent bout of hallucinations begin?" 

Will clears his throat, shakes his head. "Uh, s-sorry. Three--no, four months ago. It was--they've gotten a lot worse since then." 

Will can sense the doctor exchanging glances with his colleagues, but he keeps his gaze firmly on the sheets. This might be the answer, finally. There's something _physically_ wrong with him. He feels hope bubbling up, but along with it comes dread that he will be told no, there's nothing wrong with him, he's just a psychopath. _There's nothing wrong with you, dear one,_ that voice is whispering in his ear again…

"We need to run some tests, Mr. Graham. Try anything and you will be chemically restrained. Do you have any metal implanted in your body? Fillings, pins, pacemaker?" 

Will shakes his head. The doctor doesn't react. "No," Will rasps. "No metal." 

A couple of orderlies begin to transfer him into a wheelchair, retying his wrists and ankles once he's seated. The doctor talks in a bored, rhythmic monotone as Will is wheeled down the hall into a room with an enormous metal coffin.

"While in the machine, you must stay as still as possible, or we'll have to repeat the test. It will be loud; that's normal. Should you experience a medical emergency, there is a panic button. Do not abuse this privilege. The nurse is going to draw some blood before we get started. She will then inject you with a contrast dye that will help us to interpret the scans. Do you or any of your immediate family members have a known allergy to contrast." 

Will watches as thick droplets of dark red blood hit the insides of the blood vials. The nurse manipulates them expertly, holding them between her fingers and popping a new one on the second the previous one is filled. He counts eight. That's an uncommonly large amount of blood. The doctor clears his throat pointedly.

Will startles. "Sorry, sorry. No allergies, to contrast dye or anything else." 

The doctor leaves the room, and the two orderlies help the nurse arrange Will on his back on a hard metal board. He crosses his arms over his chest. One of the orderlies lifts them by the wrists and lays them down by his sides. Will feels like a cookie on a baking sheet, about to go into the oven. 

The nurse wipes Will's sweaty forehead and puts a tiny flat pillow under his head. Thick elastic straps are pulled taut over his knees, hips, and ribcage. It would be easy enough to wriggle out, so they must be meant as a reminder not to move, rather than actual restraints. 

The orderlies push Will's metal tray and he slides into the coffin. He doesn't feel like a cookie anymore. He feels like one of the bodies in the lab, lying in wait in his metal drawer. Waiting for someone to pull him out, so he can infect them with death…

He opens his eyes and forces himself to focus on the smooth metal interior of the machine. The noise starts up, clanking and banging, and Will takes a series of deep, slow breaths. 

He feels something slither into his ear. He grits his teeth and ignores it. If he moves, he'll just have to do this again. He feels vomit welling up in the back of his throat, and drops his jaw to let it fall out onto his chest. He opens his eyes and glances down to see…barrettes. A multicolored scarf. Long brown hair. A blue eyeball that rolls and turns by itself until it is staring at Will. He closes his eyes and begins to cry, as quietly as he can. 

He knew there would be clanking, but he didn't expect the ghosts in the machine. Abigail's voice speaks to him, casually reproachful. "I thought you were going to send me to college, not _butcher_ me. It's not like I'm not used to monsters, but dying _really hurts._ " 

Will's sobs increase in frequency. His nose is running. He hopes that whatever is in his brain kills him. That's a lie. He ought to wish for death, but he does not. He'll cling to life with the bloody stumps of his fingers, no matter what he's guilty of. 

Garrett Jacob Hobbs crouches at the end of the coffin like a gargoyle, grinning madly. "See? See?" 

"Shut the fuck up," Will tells him politely. "I'm not taking advice from you. You got caught, and then you died." Hobbs laughs ghoulishly.

"You're already caught, Special Agent Graham. My advice? Take 'em all with you when you go." 

The clanking winds down abruptly, and a voice tells him to remain still inside the machine until they retrieve him. He begins to roll his head back and forth on the metal table, soothed by the rhythmic clanking, until they finally pull him out. 

The nurse cleans his face with a wet washcloth. Lots of tears and sweat, but no vomit. No one speaks as they repeat their previous steps in reverse, unbinding him and retying him to his wheelchair, then wheeling him down the hall and tying him to his bed. Will stares pointedly at the doctor, who is fiddling with scans and charts, until the man can't avoid his eyes anymore. 

"You gonna tell me what I got?" Will bares his teeth in a feral grin, enjoying the shiver that runs down the doctor's spine. 

The beta affects a cold, bored tone to hide his own fear. "Encephalitis. Your brain is swollen. Frankly, to an astonishing degree. I'm not willing to say anything about the disease's providence until I have the blood work back. You'll need to give a urine sample, as well. Other than that, I'm clearing you for jail. Any prescriptions will be brought to you there." 

The doctor strides out with an affected swirl of his coat. Will smirks. The nurse lifts his hospital gown and tucks his penis inside a urinal with a gloved hand. She's doing a decent job of pretending that this isn't humiliating for both of them. He forces out enough urine to satisfy her, and then requests anxiety medication. She drops a handful of pills down his throat and he sinks into a thick gray fog. 

* * *

The next time Will wakes up, he's in a jail cell, on a lumpy cot, and his head feels clearer than it has in months. It's like he's just waking up from a dream where he was a different person. He coughs.

A uniform cop looks up from her desk. "Oh, you're awake. Get up; you're going to interrogation." 

Will gets up. His legs are shackled together, and his wrists are cuffed and linked to a chain around his waist. He has to piss, he really wants a slug of whiskey, and his butt cheeks are sticking together. At least interrogation should be interesting. 

The cop guides him to walk in front of her by holding the chain around his waist. She speaks into her walkie-talkie. "Officer Hayes. I'm taking that omega boy down to interrogation." 

Will stumbles through the police station, inhaling everything he can before he finally gets pushed into a chair across a table from Jack Crawford. The officer chains his hands to the table before she leaves. The world smells so _different_ as an unmated. 

"Jack."

"Will."

Crawford places both hands on the table. "Let's get this straight. I'm not here today to determine if you're guilty. There's a hell of a lot more that needs to happen before we even touch that. I want to know who the hell Peter Carwin is." 

Will breathes out and grimaces at Jack's left shoulder. "You might be disappointed. I don't know much." 

Jack growls at him. "Real name? Birthdate? Hometown?" 

Will laughs a little. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know." 

He raises his fingers off the table to stop Jack before he interrupts. 

"The man you knew as Peter Carwin was born in Appalachia approximately 44 years ago. I don't know if his people had a name for the place they lived. Peter always just called it "the mountains." Up there, all babies were born at home and census takers got shot. He never had a birth certificate or a social security number. He doesn't--sorry, _didn't_ \--know his birthday. I don't know what his parents called him." 

Will raises his eyebrows at Jack.

"Go on," the alpha grumbles, as though Will is testing his patience. He's taking notes. 

Will slumps back as far as the chair will let him. 

"He started making money as a teenager. He'd drive his truck down into the nearest small city and come back with a batch of heroin and needles to sell. Back and forth, money and drugs and gang connections, until he had enough to cut and run. After that, he bought whatever names and papers he wanted, moved around, involved himself in con jobs of varying legality. He's not that interesting." 

Jack's mouth twists as though he's seen something disgusting. "I'm gonna need a list of all his known aliases, including any nicknames and whatever he asked you to call him at home." 

Will snorts. "I call him whatever his name is at the time. Nicknames? I guess I heard people call him Hicky, or Palurdo, maybe. He kept to a New Testament theme for legal names. Uh, he was Paul MacDougal when I met him. Thomas La Fleur in New Orleans. Luke Donaldson in Pennsylvania. And he used Simon Hall on and off for side business." 

Jack checks the names against something in the file folder. "And your marriage? Legal?" 

"Are marriages usually certified by a sweaty guy named Felix in a closet in the basement of a Payday Loan place?" 

Jack glares at him. "Answer the damn question, Will. Things are bad enough for you already. Was your name legally tied to your husband's illegal dealings? Did anyone check to make sure that the two of you were physically capable of an alpha-omega bond?" 

Will leans forward again. He winds his fingers around his chains."What the fuck are you talking about, Jack? Of course our marriage wasn't legal; that's why I kept my name. So one of us would really exist. What do you mean "physically capable?""

Jack sighs. "I did wrong by you, Will, but how was I supposed to know? I assumed someone qualified had certified your union… I take it you weren't aware of your husband's…disability?" 

Will swallows and stares at the point between Jack's eyebrows, unmoving. 

Jack shifts. "Your mate wasn't really an alpha, Will. No competent bond specialist would have ever allowed him to keep you. If you had been separated then, early in your relationship, you would have recovered and been able to mate normally at some point in the future. But between his forgeries and your lack of an alpha parent …you slipped through the cracks." 

"What was wrong with him," Will whispers. "He had…he had a knot, Jack. He looked like an alpha…" 

Jack shakes his head, and when he speaks, his voice is kind. "Will, his autopsy revealed serious lesions and malformations on the parts of his brain that would have guided his relationship with the other dynamics. And, most importantly, his sense of smell was no more powerful than a beta's. It's a syndrome that's actually fairly common in the developing world, because it's a result of vitamin deficiencies in utero. It's mostly disappeared in the West, but with his background, it makes more sense." 

Will stares at the table to avoid seeing the deep pity in Jack's face. He tries to reorient himself, reinterpret his entire life in light of this new information. There had been signs, of course. Peter had never been jealous, even when Will was covered in another alpha's scent. He didn't notice if another alpha entered the house while he was out. He couldn't tell when Will was horny. Will had always thought it was a way for Peter to humiliate him, to make him ask for sex when they both knew he wanted it, but Peter hadn't known. 

He squeezes his eyes shut and consciously tears himself away from that line of thinking. It looks like he's going to have quite a while to think about the past. With his eyes still closed, he forces himself to face the thing he's been avoiding since he woke up. He knows, but he has to ask.

"Who…did the ear belong to?" 

He breathes shallowly through his lips to avoid smelling Jack's reaction to the question. 

"Abigail Hobbs." Jack doesn't sound pitying anymore. He sounds revolted. "If you tell us where you hid her body, it could help you at your trial." 

Will shudders. Tears wet his eyelashes, but they don't fall. "Jack, I didn't kill her. I killed Peter, I know I did, I can remember parts of it, but…I didn't kill Abigail. I _love_ her." 

Jack sighs. He sounds tired. "Look, Will. You've been seriously ill. Encephalitis, plus whatever being mated to a pseudo-alpha does to a person. You've got a good shot at an insanity defense. I'm probably going to lose my job for employing an unstable omega, but your best chance is to cooperate fully with whoever comes to see you." 

Jack stands and gathers his papers. Will tries not to see the defeated slump of his normally proud shoulders. Self-loathing, exhaustion, grief… Will grits his teeth and says, "Wait." Jack stops.

"Just…tell me what I'm accused of? Please." 

Jack's voice is purposely even. "The murders of Marissa Schurr, Abigail Hobbs, Peter Carwin, Dennis Huxley, and Angelo Rocchetti." 

Will curls his fingers into fists until his joints hurt. "I've never even heard of the last guy. The only one I killed is Peter." 

Jack sounds as though he's closed himself off completely. "The last two are the alphas who had their skeletons removed. Zeller has taken to calling that killer the Lammergeier, and the press has obliged. We, ah, we found your trophies. Bits of all the bodies wound into your fishing lures." 

"No," Will says automatically. "No, Jack! I'm being framed!" 

"I'm sorry, Will." Jack leaves, closing the door behind him. Will lays his head down on the cold metal table. 

Somebody is fucking framing him. The real killer, of course. It must have been the same man--the copycat, the lammergeier, and Abigail's killer. He'd seen the crime scenes. He could construct a profile. But there was another mystery. Whoever had set him up had also messed with his chemistry enough to trick his body into killing its own mate, something that should be biologically impossible. Someone had been grooming him…there was only one person who had had that kind of access to Will Graham's mind. His mind aches and cramps painfully…something with flashing lights, strange smells, an eerie voice… Hannibal. It had to be Hannibal Lecter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took me a really long time to write, even though I've been planning it since the beginning. 
> 
> If y'all were worried, the alpha cop has special training to be allowed to operate without her sense of smell. It's required when an alpha brings in an omega. She also has a beta partner. 
> 
> I'm gonna be real with you here: Abigail Hobbs doesn't wear earrings. But how the hell else do you recognize an ear, huh? Huh? 
> 
> The uniform cop refers to Will as a "boy" even though he's in his thirties. It's a derogatory way of infantilizing an adult omega--obnoxious, but not enough to get her into trouble. Kind of like how my dentist refers to all the dental hygienists as his "girls."


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should've thanked mox2y5 in my last note. She's been acting as a multi-talented beta/pre-reader/cheerleader, and the feedback helps me get my act together and actually write stuff. This chapter definitely included like 500 words of Hannibal going through security before I realized that Bryan Fuller doesn't give a shit about prison accuracy and neither should I. Which is lucky for y'all, because it was super boring. I continue to be frightened by how much of my life ends up in this disturbing story about A/B/O serial killers. You are all still perfect and I still love all of you.

Hannibal reads over the police report quickly before handing it back to Jack Crawford, carefully concealing his disgust. Not only had Will failed to contact him before or after his first true murder, he had been…"sexually aggressive" with the alpha officer who brought him in. The level of ingratitude was stunning. Hannibal had unfolded Will, peeled back his husk of normalcy, and in return, Will had excluded him from the moment that his brightness was revealed. 

With great sorrow, he addresses Crawford. "Clearly he is very ill indeed. I will of course make all my notes available to you, but I fear they will not be helpful. I significantly misread the situation." He sighs and smooths his hair back, looking as though he is reconsidering his entire life. "I may need to step back from my work for a few days. I don't know how I could have been so wrong." 

Crawford claps him on the shoulder. "Don't beat yourself up about it, Lecter. None of us believed he was capable of this. Now the thing to figure out is whether the murders were solely a result of his illness, or whether he's been playing us." 

Hannibal shakes his head sadly. "If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said Will Graham was not capable of hiding such urges from me. Now, I am not so sure. Is it possible that he did not kill them? Excepting his mate, of course. And Abigail…" He swallows back tears. "Will had access to all the bodies. Perhaps, in his madness, he pocketed little trophies from the kills of others?" 

Crawford sighs. With his shoulders slumped and his hands hanging loosely by his sides, he looks old and small. Hannibal adjusts his own posture minutely to more closely mimic Jack's. 

"That's what I was hoping, too. We all were. But…I didn't allow him to visit the scenes of either of the lammergeier murders. All he had access to was what was in the lab, but his trophies…contained shards and splinters of bone that we never catalogued. He must've taken them from the bodies before we found them." 

Hannibal exhales heavily. "I know it is ridiculous, but I still find myself hoping he has been framed. I was…quite fond of him." 

Jack nods. "We all were, doctor." He hmmphs softly. "Just drop your notes by my office whenever you get the chance. And call me if you think of anything that might be helpful. Ah--if I'm removed from the investigation, I'll have to give my successor your contact info." 

"That's fine," Hannibal murmurs, shuffling toward the door. "Thank you, Jack." 

* * * * * 

Will is curled up in his cell, waiting for his heat to hit. He can feel it rising inside of him, as no one in the hospital had bothered to give him a suppressant. It would have only held off the heat for a few days, anyway. He supposes now is as good a time as any. Not like he has anything else to do, except _figure out how he was framed for murder._ He tucks his heel underneath himself and just pushes it between his buttocks, allowing the pressure to soothe him. A voice calls from next door.

"Honestly, I was expecting someone much more femme fatale. Dark lipstick, maybe a corset. You don't _look_ like a black widow." 

Will knows that the other man in his cell block is Abel Gideon, because the smarmy, smirking bastard who'd locked him up told him so. He also told Will that everything they said and did was being recorded, and he could expect better treatment if he cooperated with the fool's attempts at psychiatric research. He can see the edge of Gideon's body from his cot, but he doesn't move up to the front of his cell, where they could really see each other. 

"We don't have those in the AO dynamics," Will informs Gideon wearily. "Can't kill our mates except in cases of extreme psychosis, so no one ever does it for the insurance money." 

"Well, aren't you a wet blanket," Gideon grumbles. "And a dynamic supremacist, too? Such a shame." 

Will peels off his jumpsuit to let his damp genitals air out. Let _Dr. Chilton_ watch if he wants. At this point, privacy is a very low priority. 

"You mind telling me how rooming an omega in heat with another prisoner doesn't qualify as "cruel and unusual"?" 

Gideon continues to speak in his light, casual tone. "Chilton's a psychopath, too, of course. He gets off on designing these little "experiments" for the people under his control. Or rather, he gets off on the undeserved praise his "research" occasionally elicits." 

A drop of sweat rolls all the way from Will's scalp down to the very base of his spine. He squeezes his cock lightly, not moving yet, just holding himself.

"A beta with pretensions of alphahood," Will says, managing to keep his voice completely normal. "A lot like you, then?" 

"Hardly," Gideon sniffs. "I take my power directly. I am an excellent surgeon and an excellent murderer. Chilton is…a simpering monkey painting himself with the feces of his betters. He loves having us locked up in here, because it allows him to exert false power over his betters." 

Will begins to rub the heel of his hand back and forth over his slick opening. The rocking motion is good, as is the pressure. If he were with Peter, they would be just starting their first mating. He muffles a groan, but is unable to suppress a soft grunt as he raises himself up, changing the angle.

"Oh, am I distracting you from your masturbation? You ought to come up here so I can watch. It'll be educational. I am a medical professional, you know." 

Will gives up teasing himself and sinks down onto two fingers with a sigh. 

"You're a dick," he informs Gideon, stretching his fingers wide and hooking them against his rim.

"Hardly," the beta replies mildly. "If I were, I daresay you'd be having much more fun." 

Will ignores him and begins to fuck himself steadily and without any hope of satisfaction.

* * * * * 

Dr. Lecter steps neatly into Chilton's office, after having been made to wait five minutes in the anteroom. The fussy little beta seems to revel in these cheap power plays. Perhaps the most pathetic thing about Frederick is how earnestly he has tried to imitate Hannibal's own persona, that of a brilliant, wealthy hedonist who makes no mistakes in either work or pleasure. But even those without any taste themselves can see that Chilton is nothing more than a sniveling pack-rat, greedily collecting for treasures he cannot appreciate. 

"Dr. Lecter," Chilton croons unctuously. He remains seated behind his desk, leaning back with his limbs spread. Hannibal holds himself perfectly upright. He won't draw attention to Chilton's rudeness, but neither will he bend himself to shake the man's hand. "I see you brought lunch." 

Hannibal smiles, beginning to unpack his containers. 

"Indeed. I have found that even the most unpleasant conversations can be improved by the promise of a home-cooked meal." He allows only a hint of his true smile to creep through: just enough to make Chilton vaguely uncomfortable. The man should know that he is dining with a predator.

"Unpleasant? I knew that you would be _jealous_ that I've acquired your golden goose, but unless you plan to blackmail me, I think we can both agree that I'm the one who should publish on him. After all, you missed…let's see…his physical disorder, his spouse's deficiency, and his _psychopathy_. Any paper you write would carry very little weight." 

Lecter drizzles a blood-red sauce over the slices of white lamb before responding. 

"Tell me, Frederick, has dear Will spoken to you yet? I imagine it would be difficult to write about him without a patient interview…"

Chilton shifts uncomfortably. "The bitch is in heat. I'm sure when it breaks, he'll want to talk. And I've got transcripts of every word he says to the guards or to his cellmate." 

"Cellmate?" Lecter bites into a seared date, imagining his companion's soft flesh giving way between his teeth. 

Chilton grins and takes a big bite. He believes himself to have the upper hand once more. 

"Abel Gideon. I've found that pairing psychopaths produces fascinating information." 

Lecter gazes across the table, directly into Chilton's eyes, and keeps his tone dry. "How intriguing. I wonder if, as a professional courtesy, you would be willing to supply Mr. Graham with some of the tools we've been using in our sessions. I believe you'll find his reactions…clinically significant. Perhaps even publishable." 

Chilton's magpie eyes gleam. "And what do you get out of this act of philanthropy, Dr. Lecter?" 

Lecter maintains his stony expression, choosing his words carefully. "I feel that I have failed Mr. Graham. If I were able to assist him through this difficult time, it would assuage my guilt and rescue my professional pride." 

Chilton smirks at that, twirling his fork and taking his time eating several bites of greens. 

"He blames you, you know. He believes your therapy turned him into what he is." Chilton is not smirking anymore. He leans forward slightly.

"I know," Lecter replies calmly.

Chilton looks down at his plate, then directly at Hannibal with a rare focus. "So…did you?" 

Hannibal does not blink, nor does he look away. He will not hide his face in shame. This is not a confession. He drops his facade of harmlessness halfway through his next statement.

"I did what I felt was best for Will. Some of my more experimental treatments may have had unanticipated effects on his delicate mind. I'm sure you understand. How many sessions did it take you to convince Abel Gideon that he is the Chesapeake Ripper?" 

Chilton snarls, nostrils flaring. On a beta, the effect is almost comical. "You'd better be careful where you point those accusations, Lecter. Abel Gideon _is_ the Chesapeake Ripper, and my therapy did nothing but unlock memories he already possessed." 

"Of course," Hannibal replies calmly, standing up and beginning to pack the remains of the lunch. "My own therapies were similarly benign. However, given that others might not see them that way, perhaps we had better keep the details between you and I." He winks at Chilton, who is looking defiant and distressed, eyes darting back and forth.

Hannibal lays a black velvet bag on Chilton's desk. "Please do give Mr. Graham my gifts." 

* * * * * 

By hour eight, Will no longer recognizes anything in his cell, except that none of it is an alpha cock. He can hear himself grunting and whining as he attempts to shove his hands, feet, and blankets into his ass. It occurs to him suddenly that perhaps all the available alphas are too far away to hear him, and he keens as loud as he can, broadcasting his need to mate. 

He quiets, listening carefully. Maybe he'll hear an alpha roar in response before he's able to see or smell it. He thinks he could stand one more minute of this if he just knew someone was coming. All he hears is the warbling vocalizations of nearby betas. Worthless, worthless! 

Sighing, Will tries to gather himself together. He needs to stay alive long enough for his alpha to find him, so he needs to do something. With effort, he stills his limbs and lies down on the cold hard floor, bracing his knees behind his elbows so he can look down at himself. 

Wet, pink, puffed and shiny…he can't imagine how he is failing to attract any alphas. His own scent is intoxicating, setting off a feedback loop in which his exposure to his own secretions intensifies his heat, over and over. He presses in with both thumbs, getting the pressure he needs, but not the depth, or the stretch…

He tries again, his head thunking back against the concrete as he searches with three fingers of one hand while he massages from the outside with the other. It's fucking hopeless. Will just wasn't designed to be able to provide himself with the necessary stretch, pressure, depth, and accuracy to affect his heat in any meaningful way. 

Exhaustion propels him into a tantrum, pummeling the floor with his fists and feet as he rails against _Chilton_. This is torture, this is sadism, this is insane… He's never heard of an omega being made to withstand heat with _nothing_ , no matter what they've done.

No alpha, no fucking machine, no knotting dildo… Christ, not even a beta nurse to find the special spots inside… 

A beta burbles something authoritative. Will directs his screams at the hazy figure outside his cell…and then he smells it. _Fuck_ , oh _fuck yes_.

He tears into the velvet bag, spreading the fabric across his face to breathe in the heady scent of _Alpha_ … God, he'd do _anything_ for the man who produced this scent.

There's more, of course, and Will's no masochist. He shoves a vibrator into his mouth immediately, sucking and nibbling at the scent it's drenched in. The alpha must've jerked off _all over_ these toys. 

Fumbling, shaking, he manages to shove a dildo into his ass without changing position. He presses the buttons on the base of it, going only by feel, until finally, finally, the thing starts to inflate. 

When the knot presses against Will's prostate, his legs and torso lift off the floor and he goes completely rigid, shrieking through his orgasm. The mumblings of the betas around him get louder, but he doesn't even hear them until he's coming down, aftershocks rolling through his body like mini-earthquakes. 

He gathers up his own ejaculate and slick, and smears the combination across his face, licking his lips and moaning at the way his own taste combines with his alpha's inside his mouth. He uses his other hand to pet his stomach soothingly as he drifts off into a muddled heat-nap.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I updated?!?!? Sorry I'm trash. Here's one little scene to see if I can still do this.

Will's favorite orderly leads him down the hall by the chain around his waist and guides him into the box in which he receives visitors, hooking his chains to the chair. The beta is handsy and sloe-eyed, but something dark is awakening in Will, and he enjoys the attention. He snaps his teeth at the man, to see what he'll do, and the nurse draws back with a smirk, allowing Will to see as he presses the heel of his hand against his crotch.

The beta cants his body like a jester and brushes Will's ears with his lips, lisping, "Enjoy your visit, Mister Graham," before locking the booth and hopping down to let in the visitor. 

It's Lecter, of course, looking positively understated in a simple brown tweed with a purple shirt and tie. A few strands of silver-brown hair fall across his forehead, and he looks every centimeter the harmless physician, baffled by his monstrous patient. A violent rush of emotions courses through Will like a river after the dams break, and the force of them actually rocks him in his seat. He is angry, of course, furiously angry, and excited and turned on and heartbroken and _hungry_. 

"Hello, Will." 

Hannibal stands with his hands behind his back and his shoulders slightly slumped. So innocent. Will imagines Chilton watching on his computer screen, taking notes. 

"Hello, Dr. Lecter. Did you come to tell me why you framed me for murder?" 

Will breathes carefully through his mouth. He's leaking onto the chair and he doesn't want to react to Lecter's scent at all if he can help it. It's time to play a game. 

Hannibal blinks sorrowfully. "My dear Will, nobody framed you for murder. If you wanted my help, you would have called me, and I would have saved you from yourself, before you turned down this dark and difficult path." 

Will laughs so hard he coughs and begins to choke. Hannibal smells aroused and disgusted and just a little confused. Will revels in it. 

"That's it? That's what this is all about? Your fucking ego?" In a voice dripping with sarcasm, he continues, "Oh, dear me, doctor, I am _so sorry_ that I didn't invite you to attend my husband's murder! But you see, I only have four place settings, and I would rather invite my _dogs_!" 

Dr. Lecter appears unruffled by the rudeness, except for a very slight curl to his upper lip. 

"It is my fault, of course. I should have been more attentive; I should have seen that you were too proud to ask for help. But now I remind you that Frederick Chilton is recording your every word, and it would behoove you to monitor your speech." 

Unable to do anything more suggestive while in chains, Will swivels his hips roughly and leers. 

"Oh, he's not recording this little session, doctor. Y'see, I've been sucking off the guards and the orderlies through the bars, and in return, they agreed to loop the tape." 

He licks his lips, and Lecter roars and rushes the cage, slamming his large body against the bars. He snarls, his eyes red, and Will interrupts loudly.

"Or maybe I'm lying, and Chilton is watching this tape and wondering why you flew into Alpha Rage because one of your patients confessed to being a prison slut." 

Hannibal blinks, and shakes his head, and smooths his hair. Still pressed against the cage, he murmurs, "My actions are hardly scandalous, dear Will. I am the alpha closest to you, I am unmated, and I possess the skills necessary to control a manipulative, homicidal omega like yourself. Should you successfully plead insanity, and therefore become available to mate, I would have the strongest claim." 

Will slumps back in his seat, momentarily defeated. "You killed my Abigail," he says in a deadened voice. He looks up at Hannibal, searching for something, _something_ …

Deep brown eyes meet blue and hold them. "I assure you, Will, I did not."


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot has happened in the last six months. I'm hoping that if I start writing this again, it'll all tumble out until it's done and I won't feel guilty about having this WIP hanging over my head. We'll see.

The next time Will leaves his cell is three days later. The lisping orderly tells him it's an alpha woman, and he prepares himself to face Alana Bloom's disapproval. He is surprised and pleased to see Beverly Katz instead. 

The orderly chains Will's wrist to the table and slips a hard candy into the pocket of his coveralls before retreating to stand against the wall, as though he isn't listening. 

Beverly's friendly face is closed off and she isn't making eye contact with Will as she speaks. 

"Look, Will, I don't know if you're guilty of all the murders or not, but I don't think this is as cut and dried as Jack sees it. We've got a new killer and she's moving fast. No leads. I want you to take a look at it." 

Will glances at the manila envelope on the table and leans back with a sigh. He's tired.

"What's in it for me, Beverly? I'm an alleged serial killer. I'm locked in a cage. Why should I want to help the FBI?"

Beverly, who has always seen the best in him, shakes her head like she doesn't even know him. 

"Maybe because men are dying and you can help save them? And because, if you take a look at this, I promise I'll listen to your side of the story. If you're innocent, I want to prove it. You were my friend, Will. I'm trying to help you." 

Will twitches his fingers, indicating that he wants the folder. Bev flips it around and opens it, leafing through the pages. 

"Four men murdered in four different medium-sized cities in Ohio. All of them tall, buff, and waxed. All of them heterosexual betas. All of them lived alone; in houses, not apartments. All of them murdered on Friday or Saturday nights in their own homes after going clubbing alone. One the first weekend of July, one the second weekend, and two the third. She's speeding up, and somehow she's not leaving DNA. What've you got?"

Will looks over the pictures of the bodies carefully, indicating when he wants Beverly to flip them. 

"Most of it you can guess, I'm sure. Killer is a beta woman, the crimes are sexually motivated. She gets off on killing them as she's fucking them…did any of the victims ejaculate prior to death?"

Beverly shakes her head definitively. 

"No, and their dicks were wiped down with cleaning solution after death. She cleaned their faces, dicks, and nipples, but left the blood pouring out of their necks. Do you think she stayed clothed, during? How else would she have hidden the knife?"

"The knife'll be disguised, decorative. A necklace, or a hair clip. Unimportant unless she leaves DNA on it…"

Will flips through the photographs again and again. Something is missing…there's a tell in here…the motive is simple, she fucks them and slits their throats at the moment of her climax. But how does she choose them? Does she stalk them first? She must, to ensure that they meet her criteria… He examines the men's bedrooms again, and it clicks. 

"Their cologne. All of these men were vain, concerned with appearance and picking up women. Look, you can see their hair gel, waxing strips, workout equipment. But no cologne. What are the chances that none of the four of them had cologne in his bedroom or bathroom?" 

Beverly leans forward to look at the file again. Her forehead nearly brushes against Will's, all wariness forgotten. 

"You're right! D'you think they all wear the same cologne, or is she collecting different ones?"

Will shrugs. 

"Not sure. But she's definitely taking the bottles as her trophies. Start there." 

He leans back, job done, and waits for his reward. 

Beverly looks at him with clear eyes as she closes the folder and tucks it away. 

"Thank you. We really needed a lead here, and knowing what her trophy is, that's something. So. Tell me what you think happened. How'd you end up in here?"

Will breathes out heavily. 

"It was Dr. Lecter. He's been grooming me since we met, experimenting on me without permission. He killed Marissa Schurr and the two Lammergeier alphas, and he wove their body parts into my lures. He knows I forget to lock the doors when I'm home alone. He probably did it at night while I was sleeping. He killed Abigail Hobbs, put a tube down my throat, and forced me to swallow her ear. It's him, Beverly, there's no one else who had that kind of access to me. He's the only one who could have framed me." 

Beverly blinks impassively.

"Did he kill your husband?"

Will places his hands flat on the table. 

"No. That was me. I remember it. But he planted the seed inside of me, don't you see? How else could I have killed my mate? He was messing with my imprinting, making me associate my alpha's scent with negative stimuli, using my encephalitis to confuse me. Omegas don't just kill their alphas, Beverly." 

Beverly looks skeptical, but not completely set against him. 

"Yeah, but he wasn't really an alpha, was he? That's what Jack said. So your imprinting was fucked from the start, and you might not have had the same biological imperative to protect your bond as normal alpha-omega pairs. Plus, you were sick. The fact that you killed him doesn't automatically prove there was an outside influence." 

Will slumps in his seat and glances up through his glasses. 

"Just look into it, okay? Please? But be careful. This is all a game to him, and he doesn't care who he hurts. He killed _Abigail._ " 

Beverly stands and leans across the table to pat him on the shoulder. 

"I will. If he's guilty, I'll find a way to prove it, I swear. Take care of yourself in here, okay?" 

She leaves and the orderly uncuffs Will and starts to lead him back to his cell. 

"What's your name?" Will mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

"Matthew," the orderly enunciates into his ear. It sounds like he's barely suppressing a giggle. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mister Graham."


End file.
